The story
The Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve is first of all a guardian of buildings. It looks after 64 architectural monuments in Vladimir, Suzdal, Bogolyubovo, Gus-Khrustalny and nearby villages, among them the white limestone churches of the 12th and 13th centuries that UNESCO lists together as the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal. The Golden Gate of Vladimir belongs to it, and so does the Cathedral of Saint Demetrius, its outer walls covered with carved beasts, saints and plants.
Paintings have a home of their own in Vladimir's Palaty, the former provincial government offices, built in the 1780s beside Cathedral Square. The picture gallery there runs from icons and 18th-century portraits by Aleksey Antropov and Fyodor Rokotov, two masters of the Russian portrait to the Wanderers, the realist painters of the 19th century, and on to Serov and Konstantin Korovin. Among its landscapes is Pine, Merikul by the forest painter Ivan Shishkin, painted in 1894 at a seaside resort on the Gulf of Finland, in present-day Estonia, where he spent several summers.
The collection started modestly in 1854, in a single room of the Vladimir boys' gymnasium. The museums of Vladimir and Suzdal were joined into one institution in 1958.
