Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

The Pushkin Museum did not start as a gallery of famous paintings. When Ivan Tsvetaev, a classics professor and father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, opened it in 1912 in a new colonnaded building by Roman Klein, it was a teaching museum of plaster casts, full-size copies of Greek and Roman sculpture made so that Moscow students who might never reach Athens or Rome could study them. Those cast halls are still there, and they are still one of the surprises of a visit.

The masterpieces came later, and by an accident of politics. Two Moscow merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, had bought French modern art before the First World War with astonishing nerve, straight from Paris dealers. After the revolution their collections were nationalized, gathered into a Museum of New Western Art, and when Stalin closed that in 1948 the pictures were split between Moscow and Leningrad.

Moscow's share landed here. So a museum founded to teach ancient sculpture now also holds Matisse, Gauguin's Tahitian women, Van Gogh, and one of the great gatherings of early Picasso, hung a few rooms from the plaster casts Tsvetaev started with.