Museums near The Bakhrushin Museum

Art · since 1969

The Tropinin Museum

significant

The Moscow portrait of the first half of the 19th century is nowhere else so densely gathered. The value is also in the origin: Vishnevsky’s private collection given to the city, a model of how Russian museums came to be.

Portraits by Vasily Tropinin and his Moscow contemporaries, work by serf artists, Russian Biedermeier. The quiet Zamoskvorechye lane and the house itself are half the pleasure.

1000 m from here · Shchetininsky Lane 10, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 31

Science and nature · since 1993

The Water Museum

for enthusiasts

A departmental museum with working models of city infrastructure — an almost extinct genre. Worth seeing for anyone curious about how the city works underground; there is nowhere else in Moscow for that.

Working models of waterworks, from the Rostokino aqueduct to the present treatment plants; the history of the Moscow sewer in drawings and photographs.

1.2 km from here · Sarinsky Proyezd 13 · ·

· No. 39

Art · since 1856

The Tretyakov Gallery

world-class

Russian art of the 11th to early 20th century is nowhere else assembled so fully — only the Russian Museum compares. But the canon was formed here: Tretyakov bought from living artists what he himself thought mattered, and one man’s private judgement became what we now call the Russian school. Seeing the 19th century elsewhere means seeing fragments.

Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ Before the People in its own hall; Surikov’s Boyarynya Morozova and Morning of the Streltsy Execution; Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son; Serov’s Girl with Peaches; Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs; the icon halls. Rublev’s Trinity is no longer here: it was handed to the Church in 2023.

1.5 km from here · Lavrushinsky Lane 10 · ·

· No. 1

Art · since 2006

The Museum of the Russian Icon

outstanding

For Ethiopian Christian art it is the only collection in Russia; for the Russian icon it competes with state museums. Add a circumstance almost unheard of anywhere in the world for a collection of this level: admission is free.

The Russian icon of the 14th to 20th century, from Novgorod panels to Old Believer painting; Ethiopian Christian art, the only such collection in Russia; a reconstructed iconostasis and post-Byzantine Greek icons.

1.7 km from here · Goncharnaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 54

Art · since 2024

The Tretyakov on Kadashevskaya

significant

Not yet a collection but an instrument: the first exhibition building in Moscow built to 21st-century museum standards — climate, light, spans. Its value is that things can now be brought here that could not be brought before.

There is no permanent collection — this is an exhibition wing. See the atrium, open without a ticket, and the façades: they carry reproductions of 34 works by Russian artists.

1.7 km from here · Kadashevskaya Embankment 12 · ·

· No. 55

History · since 1991

The Museum of Patrons

for enthusiasts

The only museum about where the Tretyakov Gallery, the Bakhrushin, the Shchukin and Morozov collections came from: about the people who paid for them. The subject runs through our whole list and is gathered nowhere else. What the Courtauld is to Britain — a private eye and a private purse turned into a public institution — the Moscow merchants were to Russia, several times over and within one generation. The rating is honest and not high: this is a private educational centre in an old merchant house, the holding is documentary and small, and there is no free entry at all, only by appointment. Come here after the great museums, having asked yourself whose money they stand on.

Documents, portraits and belongings of the Moscow merchantry of the nineteenth century. Material on the Tretyakov, Morozov, Bakhrushin and Shchukin dynasties. The house of Ivan Prostyakov, in which the museum lives.

2.0 km from here · Donskaya Street 9 · ·

· No. 79

Art · since 1986

The New Tretyakov

world-class

The Russian avant-garde is the one Russian artistic system to enter the world canon on equal terms, and its largest collection is here. MoMA and the Pompidou show Malevich and Tatlin torn from their setting; here they hang beside what they rebelled against, which changes the reading.

Malevich’s Black Square, Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, work by Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncharova and Larionov, the model of Tatlin’s Tower. Next door: the Muzeon park of dismantled Soviet monuments.

2.1 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

History · since 1859

The Romanov Chambers

significant

One of the first museums in Russia: it opened in 1859, thirteen years before the Historical Museum, and opened already as a reconstruction of boyar life — an idea unheard of at the time. What is to be looked at is not authenticity down to the nail but the conception itself: how the middle of the nineteenth century pictured the seventeenth, and what came of it. Barry and Pugin were building Westminster in those same decades, and the case is the same — a century imagining an earlier one and building it in earnest. The collection meanwhile is real: furniture, vessels, textiles, tiles. Together with the Old English Court two steps away, this is the best pair in Moscow about the city before Peter.

The sixteenth-century undercroft, the one genuine part of the building. The interiors recreated by Richter in the 1850s: the dining chamber, the boyarynya’s room, the light room. Tiled stoves, chests, vessels and textiles of the seventeenth century.

2.3 km from here · Varvarka Street 10 ·

· No. 77

History · since 1994

The Old English Court

significant

The oldest surviving secular building in Moscow. The value is in the vaults themselves: almost no 16th-century interiors are left in the city, and these were recovered by Baranovsky, the restorer who saved half of it.

The Treasury Chamber with its 16th–17th-century interior and the original vaults; the display on Russian–English trade and finds from the Zaryadye digs.

And we came to the Mosco the 4. day of October, and were lodged that night in a simple house: but the next day we were sent for to the Emperour his secretarie…

George Killingworth, 1589 in full

2.4 km from here · Varvarka 4a (Zaryadye Park) · ·

· No. 18

Architecture and estates · since 1955

The Kremlin Cathedrals

world-class

The iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral is linked with the names of Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev and Prokhor of Gorodets: the chronicle for 1405 names them as the painters of this church, though whether the present icons are that same work is still argued. Such a conjunction of names exists nowhere else. And the difference from any museum of icons is one of principle: the things stand where they stood, in the light and the space they were painted for — as the glass at Canterbury is one thing in the window and quite another in a case. What is not here is explanation: the cathedrals carry almost no labels and are meant for someone who already knows, or who came with a guide.

The deesis tier of the Annunciation Cathedral. The frescoes of the Dormition Cathedral, 1642–1644, and its iconostasis; there too the oldest icons, brought to Moscow as the lands were gathered in. The tombs of the Moscow princes and tsars in the Archangel Cathedral, painted 1652–1666. The Patriarch’s Palace: applied art and the household of the seventeenth century.

The Mosco it selfe is great: I take the whole towne to bee greater then London with the suburbes: but it is very rude, and standeth without all order. […] There is a faire Castle, the walles whereof are of bricke, and very high…

Richard Chancellor, 1589 in full

2.4 km from here · The Moscow Kremlin, Cathedral Square (entrance through the Kutafya Tower) · ·

· No. 60