The story
Nikanor Onatsky, a painter who had studied under Ilya Repin at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, founded this museum on 1 March 1920, in the middle of the civil war. He built it from private collections nationalised in the Sumy region, together with pictures belonging to Oskar Hansen, a Kyiv industrialist and collector whose collection was then in the city. Onatsky directed the museum until 1933. Soviet authorities arrested him the following year, and he was shot in 1937.
Today the galleries fill a two-storey mansion built around 1900 for the State Bank, and the holdings run past 10,000 objects, from Ukrainian and Russian painting to Western European art and decorative pieces. The collection includes seascapes by Ivan Aivazovsky, the Crimean-born marine painter, and Repin's small portrait At the Piano of 1880, showing Sofia Tarnovskaya. The Ukrainian modernist Oleksandr Bohomazov and the national poet Taras Shevchenko, who also painted, are represented too.
Sumy lies about 30 kilometres from the Russian border. Since 2022 part of the collection has been moved to safer places further from the front, and blast waves from Russian strikes have damaged the building's roof and blown out its windows.
