The story
Irkutsk's art museum counts its age from 1870, the year a 21-year-old named Vladimir Sukachev bought his first paintings. He went on to serve as the city's mayor from 1885 to 1898, and on trips to Moscow, St Petersburg and abroad he kept buying, mostly Russian painting of his own day by artists such as Ivan Shishkin and Ivan Aivazovsky. His private gallery in Irkutsk was open to anyone on Sundays, and it is often described as the first art gallery east of the Urals.
In 1920 the collection was nationalised and became the core of a city museum. It has since grown to more than 20,000 works spread over several buildings, from Siberian icons and wooden sculpture to the Russian avant-garde. From Sukachev's own era comes Ilya Repin's Beggar, also known as Fisher Girl, a ragged girl with a fishing net that Repin painted in Normandy in 1874, during his study years abroad.
