The story
Khanty-Mansiysk stands on the Ob in western Siberia, in the middle of Russia's largest oil province. In the 1990s the regional authorities set up a fund to put part of the oil revenue aside for future generations, and one of its programmes, called Rarities and Artistic Valuables, went shopping for art. It bought steadily on the open market, and in 2011 the gallery it had assembled passed to the okrug's state art museum.
So a museum barely three decades old holds icons of the 15th and 16th centuries and canvases by Rokotov, Tropinin, Aivazovsky, Shishkin, Repin, Surikov and Levitan. Almost nothing in it has been in Siberia for long.
The other half of the museum is local. Painters of the Ob North, Khanty and Mansi artists, contemporary Siberian work. The town outside has fewer than 100,000 people in it and was built up almost entirely on the money that bought the pictures.
