Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia

The creation of this important and lavishly illustrated book involved gathering material from all the major museums in Russia and abroad, as well as from public and private archives. It is a remembrance of things past and a testimonial to a great cultural and historic heritage. It is a book to fascinate anybody interested in art, collecting or Russian history.

Imperial Russia before the 1917 Revolution had a great tradition of private collecting. In this book, the authors reconstruct a tour of the great Russian collections as they would have been just prior to the fall of the Romanovs. The collections are brought back to life by watercolours and drawings of their palaces, as well as photographs of interiors, family portraits and, naturally, by the works of art that they collected, now all in Russian museums or museums abroad.

Later, among the tycoons created during the Industrial Revolution, were Pavel Tretyakov, whose gallery is now one of the most visited in Russia, and the Shchukin and Morozov families, who collected Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and all the Impressionists including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and Gauguin.