The story
For more than 30 years, Lithuania's main collection of old paintings hung inside Vilnius Cathedral. In 1956 the Soviet authorities handed the closed cathedral to the art museum as a picture gallery, and only in 1989 did it become a cathedral again. The paintings then moved to the Chodkiewicz Palace, an aristocratic house in the Old Town rebuilt in neoclassical style in the early 19th century, which has been the Vilnius Picture Gallery since 1994.
That gallery is one of nine branches of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. Its roots go back to 1933, when Vilnius was under Polish rule and the city council founded a municipal museum. The palace rooms follow Lithuanian painting from the 16th to the early 20th century, and one of the best-loved pictures there is Lithuanian Girl with Palm Sunday Fronds by Kanuty Rusiecki, a Vilnius portrait painter. Painted in the 1840s, it became a symbol of the country's Romantic movement.
The 20th century is shown across the river at the National Gallery of Art, opened in 2009 in a building put up in Soviet times as the Museum of the Revolution. The museum's holdings also include the interwar painter Antanas Samuolis, whose White Apple Tree dates from 1932. Its branches reach as far as the Baltic coast, where it runs the Palanga Amber Museum in a palace built for the Tyszkiewicz counts.
