The story
This gallery occupies a 19th-century mansion in central Kyiv that belonged to Fedir Tereshchenko, from a family of sugar magnates who were among the city's great art collectors. After 1917 their collections were nationalised, and in 1922 the state opened a picture gallery around them.
For most of its life the museum carried a different name. It was the Kyiv Museum of Russian Art, one of the largest such collections outside Russia itself, holding icons, portraits and 19th-century canvases. In 2017, as Ukraine reconsidered that framing, the museum dropped the word Russian and became simply the Kyiv Picture Gallery.
The building still reads as a private house, with painted ceilings and a grand staircase, and the collection ranges across several centuries of painting and sculpture. During the Second World War around 1,500 works were taken out of the city, and the gaps that loss left are part of the museum's history.
