Museums near The Tropinin Museum

History · since 1997

Museum of Moscow Archaeology

for enthusiasts

A museum built around what cannot be moved: the 16th-century bridge piers stayed where they were and the building went up over them. That method of display is rare, and it is the reason to go down.

The white-stone piers of the Voskresensky Bridge of the 16th to 18th century — the museum was built around them; coin hoards found in the city centre; the everyday things of medieval Moscow.

2.5 km from here · Manezhnaya Square 1a · ·

· No. 15

Science and nature · since 1716

A collection more than three hundred years old: it grew out of the mineral cabinet of Peter’s Kunstkamera and moved to Moscow with the Academy of Sciences. Some hundred and forty thousand specimens make it one of the largest mineralogical museums in the world, and for the systematics of stone it has no equal in Russia. The Vault at South Kensington shows a few dozen chosen stones magnificently; the point here is the opposite — the whole class, in order, with the ordinary specimen beside the extraordinary one, which is what a systematic collection is for. Come knowing that this is a scientific museum and not an entertaining one: cases, labels, no screens. Anyone who wants the telling needs a guided tour, and it must be booked ahead.

The systematic collection — the whole known mineral world by class. Ural malachite and rhodonite from the old crown holdings. Meteorites. Hardstone work by Fabergé and the Peterhof lapidary works. Large specimens of a size only museums of this age possess.

2.5 km from here · Leninsky Prospekt 18, building 2 · ·

· No. 63

House museums · since 1922

The Scriabin Museum

significant

A flat from which nothing was carried out: Scriabin rented it for his last three years and died here in 1915, and it became a museum in 1922 — almost without a gap. Furniture, books, piano and the fittings of the study are the very ones. But the chief thing is another: Scriabin conceived music together with light, and the trace of that conception survives in the flat — the colour score of Prometheus and the light apparatus. No other composer’s museum in Russia shows the idea and not merely the domestic life.

The Bechstein grand at which the last works were written. The study and the library with the owner’s markings. The colour score of Prometheus and the colour-light apparatus assembled to his design. A concert hall in the same house.

2.8 km from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11

· No. 76

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.

2.9 km from here · Nikitsky Boulevard 12a · ·

· No. 43

Unusual · since 1991

The Bookplate Museum

niche

The only collection of bookplates in Russia — a field between graphic art and bibliophilia shown systematically nowhere else. The circle of admirers is narrow, the subject genuine.

Bookplates by Russian and foreign artists, miniature editions and micro-books, writing on a grain of rice and miniatures on ivory.

3.0 km from here · Pushechnaya 7/5, bldg 2 (2nd floor) · ·

· No. 40

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.

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

· No. 71

Unusual · since 2007

The Arcade Machines Museum

for enthusiasts

The only museum where the exhibit works: the machine starts on a coin, and that changes the whole way of meeting the object. As a monument of late Soviet daily life it is precise and honest.

Sea Battle, Gorodki, Sniper, Safari — the machines work rather than stand behind glass; and the soda machine with a faceted glass.

3.4 km from here · Rozhdestvenka 12 · ·

· No. 48

Art · since 1947

The Rublev Museum

outstanding

The third collection of Russian icons after the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum, and the only one built as a museum of one subject: here the icon does not stand in a row of Russian art but is explained in itself, from the board and the gesso to the iconography. The holding was formed from things brought out by the museum’s expeditions from closed and ruined churches, and its value is the completeness of the line rather than single stars: famous names are almost absent, but the sequence runs unbroken from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. In Britain icons are met in ones and twos, in Byzantine rooms and in the trade; a museum where the subject has a building of its own does not exist there. The monastery’s Saviour Cathedral, in which all this stands, is the oldest surviving building in Moscow.

Icons of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, gathered by the museum’s own expeditions. Royal doors and whole iconostasis sets. Fragments of wall painting. The Saviour Cathedral of the 1420s — the oldest building in Moscow, with remains of ornamental painting associated with Rublev.

3.4 km from here · Andronyevskaya Square 10 · ·

· No. 61

Architecture and estates · since 2020

The Narkomfin Building

significant

The 1930 house by Ginzburg and Milinis is the transitional commune-house with which any conversation about twentieth-century housing begins: two-level units, a corridor every second floor, kitchen and laundry taken out of the flat. Le Corbusier knew this building and leaned on it in the Unité d’habitation at Marseille — the ribbon window, the pilotis and the interlocking sections are all here first. But expectations must be squared honestly: the restoration of 2017–2020 gave the house back to its residents, and the museum here is one restored unit, not a building. Looking is done from outside and in a single flat, by appointment.

A restored type F unit, furnished to Ginzburg’s drawings. The building itself: the residential block on columns, the communal block, the bridge between them.

3.7 km from here · Novinsky Boulevard 25, block 1 · ·

· No. 74

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.

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

· No. 13