V. V. Vereshchagin Mykolaiv Art Museum

In the summer of 1914, weeks before the First World War began, a local society of art lovers in the shipbuilding city of Mykolaiv opened a museum named after Vasily Vereshchagin, the Russian painter of war scenes who had died ten years earlier when the battleship Petropavlovsk sank off Port Arthur. Its first rooms were in a former military guardhouse, and Vereshchagin's widow, Lydia, sent things that had belonged to him.

The collection was plundered during the German occupation in the Second World War and rebuilt afterwards with transfers from Soviet museums. In 1986 it moved to a larger building, and today it holds close to 10,000 works. Among them are a picture of the poet Pushkin on the Black Sea shore, painted in 1887 by the marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky, and Ilya Repin's 1913 oil sketch of Tsar Alexander II on horseback, which came to Mykolaiv in 1974.