Museums near The Bookplate Museum

Art · since 1918

The Museum of Oriental Art

outstanding

Western museums of the East were formed by colonial routes; this collection grew out of nationalised private collections and Soviet expeditions. Hence the Central Asian, Caucasian, Buryat and Chukchi sections that London and Paris lack: there the East begins with India and Egypt, here with what lay inside the country and next to it. That is the reason to come.

Central Asian and Caucasian carpets and metalwork transferred from the State Museum Fund; Iranian Qajar painting and tilework; Chinese bronze and porcelain, Japanese prints; a Korean section rare for Russia; Buddhist sculpture of Buryatia and Mongolia.

1.5 km from here · Nikitsky Boulevard 12a · ·

· No. 43

Art · since 1965

Apollinary Vasnetsov Museum

for enthusiasts

Apollinary Vasnetsov’s reconstructions of old Moscow are not painting but scholarship: the artist made archaeological observations, and his views still serve as textbook illustrations. Here they hang in the flat where they were made.

The studio with its original furnishings, and the views of old Moscow — historical reconstructions by which the medieval city is still imagined.

1.6 km from here · Furmanny Lane 6, flats 21–22 (3rd floor) ·

· No. 13

Architecture and estates · since 1965

The Ryabushinsky Mansion

outstanding

The best surviving interior of Moscow Art Nouveau: Shekhtel built the mansion in 1900–1903 and thought it out down to the door handle, and the wave staircase with its jellyfish lamp is the thing for which one comes here instead of any museum of decorative art. What Horta did at the Hôtel Tassel and Mackintosh at the Glasgow School of Art — one hand over the whole building, from plan to fittings — Shekhtel did here, and here it survives with the fittings in place. Upstairs is hidden an Old Believers’ chapel that could not be shown openly, and it has come through. The memorial part — Gorky lived here from 1931 — is markedly weaker than the architecture, and that should be known in advance: one comes for Shekhtel, not for Gorky.

The wave staircase with its jellyfish light. Stained glass and the mosaic frieze of orchids along the façade. The Old Believers’ chapel on the top floor. Gorky’s study and library.

1.7 km from here · Malaya Nikitskaya Street 6/2 ·

· No. 71

Art · since 1981

The Museum of Decorative Art

significant

Lacquer miniature of four schools and propaganda porcelain — the objects by which Russia is recognisable in world decorative art. The material is first-rate; the display is not up to it.

Lacquer miniature — Palekh, Fedoskino, Mstyora, Kholuy; Soviet propaganda porcelain; toys of the peoples of the world; embroidery and samovars.

1.8 km from here · Delegatskaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 32

Art · since 1912

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

world-class

The Louvre and the Metropolitan hold more originals; what is unique is Tsvetaev’s cast collection — the only large teaching museum of the history of art in the world still intact and still working as intended. In Europe such collections went into storage in the 20th century. Add the Fayum portraits and objects from Schliemann’s Trojan hoards.

The teaching collection of plaster casts after antique and Renaissance sculpture — Tsvetaev’s idea, unmatched for completeness; the Fayum portraits; objects from Priam’s Treasure found by Schliemann at Troy; the Egyptian collection. The French 19th–20th century is in the Gallery at Volkhonka 14, on a separate ticket.

1.9 km from here · Volkhonka 12 · ·

· No. 20

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.

2.0 km from here · Kadashevskaya Embankment 12 · ·

· No. 55

Science and nature · since 1706

The Apothecary Garden

outstanding

A garden in the middle of the city: five hundred metres to the Garden Ring, and the ground is not large. Founded by Peter I in 1706. Moscow had several such physic gardens, and every one of them except this vanished without trace, while the larch here, planted by tradition by Peter himself (an increment borer confirms an age of only two hundred years — our note), is alive still, though since a lightning strike early in the twentieth century it has hardly grown. The Palm House of 1891 is the centre of a tropical collection gathered over more than two hundred years.

Peter's larch, as the garden has always called it, stands in the middle of the arboretum. Beside it a pedunculate oak more than two hundred years old, limes past a hundred, and a rare weeping form of the Dahurian larch. The Palm House of 1891: palms, figs and pandanus at their full height. The Succulent House on the upper floor of the glasshouse block holds cacti, euphorbias, agaves and aloes, some of them among the rarest anywhere. The old pond with its water plants, the shade garden, the heather slope where the rockery used to be; the conifer slopes took a gold diploma of the landscape architecture prize in 2013.

2.1 km from here · Prospekt Mira 26, building 1 · ·

checked 20 August 2026 · No. 102

Unusual · since 1912

The Museum of Music

outstanding

One of the largest collections of musical instruments in the world and the only place in Russia where the instrument is shown as an object of history. One can go from horn and gusli to Murzin’s synthesiser, named with Scriabin’s initials — the machine on which the music for Solaris was written. Here too is kept the State Collection of unique instruments: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. The Horniman shows the instrument as ethnography and the Royal College of Music shows it as performance history; here both lines run in one room, and the electronic one continues them. One thing must be known: the collection is a working one, instruments are lent to musicians, and they are not always to be found in the case.

Instruments of the peoples of the world, from Russian gusli to the Japanese koto. The ANS synthesiser of Yevgeny Murzin, named with Scriabin’s initials. Autographs and manuscripts of Russian composers. The State Collection of stringed instruments, when it is in the museum.

2.1 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

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.

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

· No. 54

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.

2.2 km from here · Lavrushinsky Lane 10 · ·

· No. 1