The story
When the city council voted in 1897 to found a municipal picture gallery, Lviv was Lemberg to the government in Vienna and Lwów to most of its residents, the capital of the Austrian province of Galicia. The gallery opened in 1907, and the city soon bought the collection of Jan Jakowicz, about 2,000 objects including several hundred Western European paintings. Under Polish, Soviet and Ukrainian rule the holdings kept growing, and today they number more than 62,000 works.
Much of the gallery's present shape comes from one director. Borys Voznytsky ran it from 1962 to 2012, half a century, and in the Soviet years he gathered Baroque sculpture from closed and ruined churches, among it carvings by Johann Georg Pinsel, the 18th-century sculptor of Galicia. He also took on neglected castles, and Olesko, Pidhirtsi and Zolochiv are now branches of the gallery. Since 2013 it has carried his name.
In the city the collection is split between two palaces. The Potocki Palace shows European art from the 14th to the 18th centuries, and the Łoziński Palace on Stefanyka Street covers the 19th and 20th. Polish painting is strong here, as befits a gallery founded in Lwów. Jan Matejko, the history painter from Kraków, can be followed from canvases he painted at about 20 to a portrait of his four children from 1879. In 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion, staff packed the works and moved them to safety, and the gallery later reopened rooms with temporary exhibitions.
