The Marble Palace

The Rzhevsky Brothers Collection from St Petersburg

In December 1998 the Russian Museum received a donation of artworks from local collectors, the brother Jacob and Joseph Rzhevsky. Their donation includes unique works of painting, graphic art, sculpture and applied art. It took more than half a century to put all these works together. Now the collection consists of 503 works, half of which are paintings and graphic works of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most noteworthy are the works of Alexander Ivanov, Hovhannes Aivazovsky, Ivan Shishkin, Boris Kustodiev, Mikhail Nesterov, Alexander Benois, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Pyotr Konchalovsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Furniture, long-case and mantel clocks of the 18th and 19th centuries from the Western Europe and Russia hold a specific place in the Rzhevsky Brothers collection.

Among the porcelain works of special interest are the works from the Imperial Porcelain Factory, the Gardner and the Kuznetsov Porcelain Factory, Sevres and Meissen Porcelain Factories, as well as Berlin Royal Porcelain Manufactory.