Nikolaev Regional Art Museum of V.V. Vereshchagin

Shipbuilders’ city of Nikolaev, Ukraine is well-known. Not remain aloof from the new conditions of time and building new independent state Nikolaev keep their historical and cultural traditions.

Nikolaev Regional Art Museum of V.V. Vereshchagin was recognized as one of the city centers of culture and aesthetic education. Currently the museum's collection includes about ten thousand items which represent a kind of artistic chronicle of Ukraine and many other countries.

The museum is located in one of the best buildings in the city (Bolshaya Morskaya Street 47) which is an architectural monument of the second half of XIX century.

The museum was founded in 1914 as a memorial to the famous Russian painter of battle-pieces. Its founders were members of the local community of art lovers. The I.E. Repin greatly helped to the society in this matter who highly appreciated the creativity of V.V. Vereshchagin and considered the crowning of memory of the artist's as duty and honor of all compatriots and contemporaries.

The first collection of the museum was located in a former guardhouse of military department and included masterpieces that were transferred by the Academy of Fine Arts, the Russian Museum of Alexander III in St. Petersburg as well as personal belongings which were referred by the widow of V.V. Vereshchagin Lydia Vasilyevna.

After the October Socialist Revolution the collection was filled with masterpieces from nationalized private collections, paintings of R.G. Sudkovskiy transferred in 1924 from Ochakov by brother of the artist, masterpieces of Soviet artists which came from the All-Ukrainian Committee for the Arts. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 collection consisted of about a thousand pieces. But during the time of Nazi occupation the museum was barbarously robbed.

Restoration began immediately after the expulsion of the Nazis out of city. In 1945 the museum reopened in a small old estate. The some pieces of V.V. Vereshchagin, his personal belongings, pictures of I.K. Aivazovsky, R.G. Sudkovskiy, M.M. Antokolsky and other artists were found. Great help in forming of the postwar collection had a Kiev Museum of Russian Art, Kiev Museum of Western and Oriental Art (now - the Museum of Arts of Bohdan and Vera Khanenko) and the Odessa Art Museum. During 1970-1980 the museum's collection is regularly updated with the incomings from the Directorate of Art Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, Union of USSR Artists and other organizations as well as from private collections.

In 1986, the museum celebrated its movement to a new spacious building. The exposition of domestic art which includes paintings, sculpture, decorative art, graphic art was held in its halls on the second floor. The museum exhibits masterpieces of Western art on the third floor.


Address: Bolshaya Morskaya Street 47
Phones: +380(512)37-23-67, 37-23-53