The Gallery, a new section of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, opened its doors to the public in August 2006. The setting up of the Gallery was the next step in the development of the Museum, following the opening of a new building for the Museum of Private Collections in 2005 and the Museion Centre of Aesthetic Training for children and young people in 2006.
The Gallery's twenty-six rooms contain a collection of works by masters of the 19th and 20th centuries. Whole rooms are devoted to a single movement in European art or the work of a single artist. There is a special room for the early 19th-century German school of painting represented by the works of Caspar David Friedrich and the Nazarenes. Smaller rooms enable visitors to take a new look at the well-known pictures of Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Dominique Ingres. The Spanish school is represented by Francisco de Goya. There is a special room for the Paris Salon painters Jean-Leon Gerome, Paul Delaroche and Eugene Louis Isabey. The works of the French landscape painters Camille Corot and members of the Barbizon School Theodore Rousseau, Jules Duprd, Diaz de la Pena and Charles Daubigny seem to have been specially intended for the Gallery's interiors. Canvases by Gustave Courbet, Jean-Franqois Millet and Honore Daumier complete the panorama of French realist art.
The pride of the Gallery consists of the paintings by French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and masters of the early 20th century: Claude Monet, August Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Andre Derain and Menri Rousseau. In the new display you can see works by representatives of other European schools, and also American art. Alongside the canvases of Vasily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico are pictures by Aquille Funi, Carl Hofer, Felice Casorati, Hans Grundig, Volker Bohringer and Rockwell Kent. The work of such eminent European sculptors as Antoine-Louis Barye, Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Ossip Zadkine and Hans Arp is also represented.
