Drawing and Waterсolours

The Russian Museum’s collection of drawings and watercolours comprises more than 110,000 works and is one of the largest museum collections of Russian graphic art. It began to take shape when the museum opened in 1898: the first displays already included watercolours, drawings, cartoons and preparatory studies by nineteenth-century Russian artists. A substantial part of the early collection came from a gift by Princess Maria Tenisheva, which included works by Orest Kiprensky, Karl Bryullov, Pavel Fedotov, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov and other artists.

During the twentieth century, the collection grew rapidly through private collections, major donations and targeted acquisitions. It came to include works of the Russian avant-garde, wartime graphic art, book illustration and works by leading twentieth-century artists. Following a reorganisation of the museum’s graphic collections in 1995, a unified Department of Drawings and Watercolours of the Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries was established, bringing together works that trace the development of Russian graphic art across three centuries.