Kharkiv Museum of Art

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One of the oldest museums in Ukraine - Kharkiv Museum of Art - is among the most famous and the most attended ones in town. Its vast collection, formed over 200 years ago, includes unique works by artists of world and Ukrainian painting, graphics, sculpture, and decorative and applied art.

Museum's collection started to form in 1805, with Kharkiv University's founder, prominent scientist and public figure, buying in St. Petersburg private collection that consisted of almost two and a half thousand graphic works by prominent West European artists. There were works by Pieter Bruegel, Jan van Dyck and Fransois Boucher among them. Based on this collection, he created the University Museum of Fine Arts and Antiquities, whose collection was later expanded by University's alumni.

In 1886, the Art and Industry Museum was founded in Kharkiv. It accumulated valuable works of art and unique sacral relicts: icons, books published in Russia before the 18th century, ancient embroidery...

Half a century later collections of these two museums merged in newly established Picture Gallery, which was later renamed into Kharkiv Museum of Art. Its impressive collection was placed in the most beautiful building of the early 20th century, whose architecture gracefully combined elegant classicism and pretentious baroque.

Currently museum's collection numbers over 20,000 pieces. Its pride is the largest in Ukraine collection of artworks by prominent Russian artist Ilya Repin: it includes 11 pictorial canvases and 8 graphical works. One of many variants of the famous picture 'Reply of the Zaporizhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire' is among them. Kharkiv Museum also keeps works by other famous Russian painters - Ivan Aivazovsky, Karl Bryullov, Ivan Shishkin, Alexander Benois.

Ukrainian art of the 16th - 20th centuries is presented with original works by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Trush, Petro Levchenko. Besides that, the Kharkiv Museum of Art is proud of its valuable collection of works by West European artists of the 16th-20th centuries. Engravings by prominent German painter Albrecht Dürer, unique pictorial works by Jan van Scorel and canvases by Ferdinand Bol are among them.