The story
On the high bank of the Volga in Rybinsk stands an ornate building in the neo-Russian style, made to look like an old Muscovite palace. It opened in 1912 as the town's New Grain Exchange, designed by the Moscow architect A. V. Ivanov, at a time when Rybinsk was a major hub of the Volga grain trade. After decades as a military hospital, a headquarters and a clinic, it was handed to the Rybinsk Museum-Preserve in 1992 and is now its main home.
The museum grew from a natural-history display opened in 1910, and after 1919 its art collection was filled with paintings and furniture nationalized from the noble estates around the town. One prized ensemble is the portrait gallery of the Musin-Pushkin counts. In the Russian rooms you will find landscapes by Ivan Shishkin, the painter of pine forests, and work by the marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky, alongside Western European pictures and porcelain. A separate branch is devoted to Mologa, the old town drowned in the 1940s when the Rybinsk Reservoir was filled.
