Russian Museum

When Tsar Nicholas II founded this museum in 1895, he did it in memory of his father, Alexander III, and he housed it in one of the finest buildings in Saint Petersburg. The Mikhailovsky Palace was built in the 1820s by Carlo Rossi, the architect who gave the imperial capital many of its yellow-and-white classical facades, and its grand staircase and white hall are part of the visit before you reach a single painting.

Inside is the largest collection of Russian art in the world, told almost as a national story in paint. Karl Bryullov's enormous Last Day of Pompeii, finished in 1833, shows the city dying under ash and made its painter famous across Europe. Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga lines up eleven exhausted men dragging a boat upstream, a picture that turned ordinary labourers into a subject worth a huge canvas.

The rooms keep going, from medieval icons through Aivazovsky's storm-lit seas to the early 20th century, where Kazimir Malevich's Black Square hangs as a plain black shape that tried to wipe painting clean and start over. Across the river the Hermitage gathers the art of the wider world, while this museum was built to hold Russia's own, and it grew from under 2,000 works at its opening to a collection now numbered in the hundreds of thousands.