L'histoire
One painting in Nizhny Novgorod is so large it has a hall to itself. Konstantin Makovsky's Minin's Appeal, finished in 1896, stands nearly seven metres high and six across, the biggest canvas in Russian art, and it shows the merchant Kuzma Minin in 1611 rousing the townspeople to raise an army and drive foreign troops out of Moscow.
The city's art museum, one of the oldest public galleries in Russia, opened in that same year. Its main Russian holdings hang in the old military governor's house inside the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, the fortress above the Volga.
The rooms move through Russian painting from icons to Repin, Kustodiev and Roerich, some of it given by the writer Maxim Gorky, who grew up in the town.
