The story
On Republic Square in Yerevan, in a tall stone building shared with the history museum, hangs the largest collection of Armenian art anywhere. The National Gallery was founded in 1921, in the first year of Soviet Armenia, and its first director was the painter Martiros Saryan, whose own hot-coloured views of Armenian mountains and orchards fill several rooms.
Around them are medieval manuscript miniatures, church-inspired paintings, and Russian and Western European rooms gathered over a century. The gallery also owns 62 canvases by Ivan Aivazovsky, the 19th-century master of the sea, who was born to an Armenian family in Crimea and painted storms, moonlit water and shipwrecks by the hundred, the swell of a wave lit from within as if the water itself were glowing.
