First large-scale exhibition of canvasses from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery has been opened in the London National Portrait Gallery to celebrate the 160th anniversaries of both the English and Russian museums.
In a month the largest collection of paintings of the National Portrait Gallery will be accessible in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The exhibition Russia and Art: Epoch of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky that is presently displayed in the Portrait Gallery in London was prepared by both the museums for three years. It runs from March 17 to June 26, 2016. The exhibition From Elizabeth to Victoria presenting portraits of outstanding British figures from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery will be held in the Tretyakov Gallery from April 21 to July 24.
Lots of paintings from both the British and Russian collections have never been taken overseas before.
The exchanges of collections is carried out not only due to the galleries' anniversaries but also in the framework of the Russian - British Bilateral Year of Literature and Language.
The Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Olga Golodets called the collection exchange between the museums "an event that is brilliant from the artistic viewpoint and fabulous from the historical perspective".
Epoch of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky
The Tretyakov Gallery has provided Britain with 26 of the most valuable canvasses of the Golden Age of the Russian portrait embracing the period from the late 1860s to World War I. The exposition includes works by the outstanding Russian artists of that era: Nikolay Ge, Ivan Kramskoy, Vassily Perov, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel.
The outstanding figures of the Russian culture and art, whose portraits are displayed at the exhibition, are widely known in Britain too: Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anna Akhmatova, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and others.
Most of these portraits were personally acquired by the famous patron of arts Pavel Tretyakov, whose portrait painted by Ilya Repin opens the exhibition.
"It is a very significant cultural exchange, which we are very proud of. Such a grand exhibition of Russian portraits has never been held in any of the British museums", – the head of the National Portrait Gallery Nicholas Callinan commented to RIA Novosti.
From Elizabeth to Victoria
"Right after a month a reciprocal exhibition of the London National Portrait Gallery will bring the exposition From Elizabeth to Victoria to Moscow. I think that it will deeply impressively the development of our relations" — Olga Golodets emphasized.
Visitors to the Tretyakov Gallery will see portraits of Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Elizabeth the First, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, George Byron, as well as that of Thomas Carlyle, one of the founders of the National Portrait Gallery and the very first painting in his collection - the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare.