Description of the attraction
The Serpukhov Museum is recognized as one of the best regional museums in Russia and is famous for its magnificent collection of easel paintings by Russian and Western European masters, works of famous sculptors, as well as works of applied art.
The building of the museum (originally the Maraevs' mansion) was designed by the academician of the Petersburg Academy of Arts R. I. Klein. Next to the museum is the Old Believers Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos of the Old Pomorsk-Fedoseevsky Consent, built in 1912 according to the project of the architect M. G. Piotrovich.
The museum's collection is based on a collection of works by Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch masters, as well as Russian portrait painters of the 17th-18th centuries, Anna Vasilyevna Maraeva, a manufacturer and merchant of the 1st guild, acquired around 1896 from the Moscow collector Yuri Vsevolodovich Merlin, a passionate collector of monuments antiquity. The sources of the collection were mainly the Moscow and St. Petersburg antique markets.
The museum was created in 1920 as a result of the nationalization of Maraeva's property. In Soviet times, the collection was supplemented with art objects seized from the estates of the Serpukhov district, as well as exhibits from the First Proletarian Museum. It included monuments of art from the mansions and estates of the Orlov-Davydov, Sollogubs, and Prince Vyazemsky counts.
