The story
Two portraits of the same woman are among the reasons to visit the Smolensk Art Gallery. Princess Maria Tenisheva, a collector and patron who ran an artists' colony at Talashkino outside Smolensk, sat for Ilya Repin in 1896 and for Valentin Serov two years later, and both pictures belong to the gallery. Her collection became one of the most important parts of the museum, which occupies the red-and-white building of the former Alexander Real School in the centre of the city.
During the Second World War most of the collection was evacuated east, first to Gorky and then to Novosibirsk, though not everything was saved. What a visitor sees today runs from icons through Shishkin, Levitan and Vrubel, with a smaller group of Western European pictures. One unexpected work is Ivan Aivazovsky's Winter Caravan on the Road of 1857, a snowy overland scene by a painter famous for the sea. Another is Francisco de Zurbarán's Saint Justa, the martyr of Seville, shown with the clay pots of her family's pottery trade.
