The story
Naming a museum in Saratov after Alexander Radishchev needed approval from the very top. Radishchev, an 18th-century writer, had been sentenced to death for A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, his book attacking serfdom, and the sentence was commuted to exile in Siberia. A century later his grandson, the marine painter Alexei Bogolyubov, who lived in Paris, offered Saratov his collection on condition that the museum bear Radishchev's name. Permission was granted, and the museum opened in 1885 in a building put up for it, seven years before Pavel Tretyakov gave his gallery to Moscow.
Bogolyubov's years in Paris shaped what you see. He collected French landscape painting of the Barbizon circle, and the museum still has a good group of it, with Corot among the names. He also looked after young Russian artists sent to study in France. Ilya Repin painted his portrait in 1876, and it hangs here beside sketches Repin made in those years in Paris and on the Normandy coast.
The collection later grew far beyond the founder's gift. Viktor Borisov-Musatov, the Symbolist painter, was born in Saratov, and the museum holds a large body of his work. The avant-garde is here as well, with Kazimir Malevich's Four Squares of 1915, a Suprematist canvas just under half a metre across.
