Galleria Tret'jakov

The gallery carries one man's name because it was, quite literally, one man's project. Pavel Tretyakov, a Moscow textile merchant, began buying Russian paintings in the 1850s with a clear aim, to build a national collection at a time when serious collectors chased European art. He bought straight from living artists, filled his house until the pictures crowded the family out, and in 1892 handed the whole collection, some 2,000 works, to the city of Moscow as a gift.

The building he had expanded became a landmark in its own right. Its fairy-tale front, all red brick, white stone and a pointed gable like a folk tale come to life, was designed after 1900 by the painter Viktor Vasnetsov, so the container matches the Russian art inside.

And that art is the story of Russian painting itself. Here is Andrei Rublev's Trinity, the 15th-century icon widely held to be the greatest in Russian art, and the huge canvases of the Wanderers, the realists who broke with the academy. One of them, Ilya Repin's picture of Ivan the Terrible cradling the son he has just killed, has been attacked twice by visitors, slashed in 1913 and struck again in 2018, and each time painstakingly restored. Nearby hang Kramskoy's watchful portraits and Surikov's vast, crowded scenes from Russian history, and a whole hall of medieval icons the museum shows as art.