The story
Taras Shevchenko is Ukraine's national poet, but he was also a trained painter, and this Kyiv museum, in a 19th-century palace, holds the fullest collection of his art, more than 700 works.
Shevchenko was born a serf, the property of a landlord, and his freedom was bought in an unusual way. In 1838 the painter Karl Bryullov made a portrait of the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, it was raffled among the imperial court, and the money raised was used to purchase Shevchenko out of serfdom. That portrait, the literal price of his liberty, is one of the museum's treasures.
Freed, he studied at the Academy in Saint Petersburg and worked as an etcher and watercolourist, later arrested and sent into exile for his writing. The collection sets his own drawings and prints beside work by his contemporaries, and it has grown to tens of thousands of items documenting a life that became a symbol of the nation.
