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Moscow museums · House museums
House museums · since 1953

The Vasnetsov House

The Viktor Vasnetsov Museum
original name: Музей Виктора Васнецова
for enthusiasts
The Bogatyrs was painted in this studio. It hangs in Lavrushinsky Lane, and the Vladimir Cathedral murals stayed in Kyiv. What is here is the house. Viktor Vasnetsov built it for himself in 1894 to his own design, and the Tretyakov Gallery calls it the first dwelling house in the neo-Russian manner; upstairs is the studio the whole thing was raised for, and in it stayed The Poem of Seven Fairy Tales, seven canvases he kept painting from 1901 until the year he died. Of twenty-six thousand items the greater part came as a gift from his heirs, who ran the house as a museum from 1927, kept it open through the years when they were themselves living on the ground floor, and gave house, furniture and pictures to the state in 1948. Our view: the paintings that made his name are elsewhere, and one comes here to watch a single man carry his Russian style all the way from the canvas down to the furniture.
Minimum route
1 hour
Founded
1953
Ticket
from ₽400
Today
10:00–17:00
What to see

The upper floor is the studio the house was built for: high ceilings, wide windows onto the yard and the garden. Viktor Vasnetsov painted the Bogatyrs and Sirin and Alkonost here. Both went long ago to Lavrushinsky Lane. What stayed is The Poem of Seven Fairy Tales — seven canvases of 1901–1926, from The Sleeping Princess to The Frog Princess. Beside them are icons and peasant costumes from his own collection. His brushes lie in a birchbark box on the work table. Downstairs, two rooms survive almost intact. The dining room and the drawing room keep their furnishing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: furniture to drawings by Vasnetsov and Yelena Polenova, family portraits by his own hand. In the yard, on the brick fire wall, is the mosaic Christ Enthroned after his design. It was set early in the twentieth century in Frolov’s St Petersburg workshop and moved here in the 1970s.

Minimum route — 1 hour for the essentials

One hour.

  1. 30 minutesthe studio: The Poem of Seven Fairy Tales, icons and peasant costumes in the cases, the easels.
  2. 20 minutesthe ground floor: dining room and drawing room, furniture to drawings by Vasnetsov and Polenova, family portraits.
  3. 10 minutesthe yard: the mosaic on the fire wall and the garden.
Reference
About the museum
The museum opened on 25 August 1953. The house had been one for a quarter of a century by then. In March 1927, less than a year after Viktor Vasnetsov died, his heirs put a memorial exhibition of 212 paintings and drawings into the studio, kept it open until 1933 while the family went on living on the ground floor below, and in April 1948, for the centenary of his birth, gave the house, its furniture and its works of art to the state. The rooms were reassembled from what the family remembered. The fence and the terrace had not survived to the opening; they were rebuilt from drawings by his daughter Tatyana Vasnetsova, who stayed on in the house until her death in 1961 and went on handing over the archive, the library and the photographs.
The building
A two-storey log house with a tower over the porch, its upper floor given to the studio, whose ceiling height let Vasnetsov work on church compositions for St George’s Cathedral at Gus-Khrustalny, for the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg and for the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw. To the north and west a tall plank fence hides a garden of oaks and elms a hundred years old, and to the east the plot is closed by a brick fire wall raised in 1893, the same wall that now carries the mosaic. The lane the front faces has carried Vasnetsov’s name since 1954; in his lifetime it was Novoproyektirovanny, and the government order of 1950 that founded the museum still calls it 3rd Troitsky.
Getting in
Address
Vasnetsova Lane 13
How to get there
Metro Prospekt Mira or Sukharevskaya, then on foot through the courtyards.
Opening times
closed for the day
Mon, Tueclosed
Wed–Sun today10:00–17:00
last admission 1 h before closing
Box office and entry until 16:00. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Closed for cleaning on the last Thursday of the month.
Tickets
Adults 400 ₽; concessions 200 and 250 ₽; free for some categories.
from ₽400
tickets online
Audio guide
the museum's own app · included in the ticket
Free, on the izi.TRAVEL platform: your own phone and the app are needed. Which languages, we have not checked.
When to go
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00–17:00; last entry 16:00. Closed for cleaning on the last Thursday of the month. Spring is our pick: the garden shows from the studio windows, and snowdrops and squills come up in it.
Contacts
tretyakovgallery.ru · +7 495 681-13-29
Of interest to children
The fairy-tale canvases need no explaining to a child. The museum runs a children’s tour of the house, “The House Where Fairy Tales Live”. From 5.
Access for visitors with limited mobility
The museum — no. The museum states that a visit in a wheelchair is not possible, citing the architecture of the house; a stone staircase links the two floors. Two city disabled parking bays are close by: Vasnetsova Lane 12, two spaces, and Vasnetsova Lane 9/1, three. For visitors on the autism spectrum the museum publishes a social story, “I am going to the Viktor Vasnetsov Museum”.
Getting there — partly. Prospekt Mira and Sukharevskaya have no lifts to the platform. The metro provides an escort along the whole route free of charge: +7 495 622-73-41, 8 800 250-73-41.
Nearby
All nearby
If this moved you
In the same city

If the house has moved you, the Bogatyrs and Alyonushka, both painted in this studio, hang in Lavrushinsky Lane — and the gallery’s own fairy-tale porch was drawn by the same hand.

world-classThe Tretyakov Gallery

If the kept studio said more to you than the painting did, the younger brother’s survives too: in Furmanny Lane Apollinary Vasnetsov painted old Moscow, and his views still illustrate the textbooks.

for enthusiastsApollinary Vasnetsov Museum

If the icons from the artist’s own collection stopped you, a whole museum of the Russian icon — from Novgorod panels to Old Believer work — stands on Goncharnaya Street, and it charges nothing.

outstandingThe Museum of the Russian Icon
Abroad

If what interests you is the stuff a national style was made of, Hungarian peasant life is gathered denser in the Budapest Ethnographic Museum than anywhere else: the same order of things, another people.

significantMuseum of Ethnography · Budapest
checked 20 August 2026 · No. 100

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