The story
In 1913 the painter Mikhail Nesterov, who was born in Ufa in 1862, gave his home town more than a hundred paintings. About 30 were his own. The rest were works he had gathered by Russian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among them Ivan Shishkin, the painter of pine forests, Isaac Levitan and Alexander Benois. They were meant for the Aksakov People's House, then being built in Ufa.
The First World War and the revolutions of 1917 stalled that building, and the pictures stayed in Moscow until 1919. Late that year, with Ufa under Soviet control after Admiral Kolchak's White forces had been driven out, the architect Ilya Bondarenko brought the collection across a country still at war and became the museum's first director. It opened in January 1920 in the former house of a merchant named Laptev.
The museum took Nesterov's name in 1954. Its holdings now run to more than 12,000 objects, from old Russian icons to paintings by Ilya Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov and the avant-garde painter David Burliuk, who spent time in Bashkiria before emigrating. Nesterov himself is represented by around 60 works, twice the number he gave in 1913.
