The story
On the morning of 10 October 2022, Russian missiles struck central Kyiv, and the blast near Tereshchenkivska Street blew out every window on the front of the Khanenko Museum and damaged part of its roof. The building is the mansion that Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko built in the late 1880s to live among their collection. He was a lawyer and industrialist, she a daughter of the Tereshchenko sugar family, and together they bought European paintings, Byzantine icons, Asian art and antiquities.
Bohdan died in 1917 and left the collection to the city. Varvara confirmed the gift in 1918, and the museum opened in 1919, in the middle of the civil war. Soviet authorities later dropped the founders' name, and it came back only after Ukrainian independence.
After the strike, some of the collection went abroad for safekeeping and conservation. A group of Byzantine icons was shown at the Louvre in Paris, and European paintings travelled to the Royal Castle in Warsaw, where they went on display in December 2024. Among them was a portrait of Stanisław August, the last king of Poland, painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in 1797, after he had lost his throne. He wears a feathered hat, a dark blue doublet and a lace collar, dressed in the manner of Henry IV of France, a king he admired.
