The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow holds Russia's second-largest collection of Western European art after the Hermitage. It opened in 1912 as a teaching museum of Moscow University, founded largely by Ivan Tsvetaev, father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Roman Klein's neoclassical main building presents antique casts, ancient Egyptian finds and Old Masters from Botticelli to Rembrandt. After 1948 the museum inherited the holdings of the closed-down Museum of Modern Western Art, which brought in hundreds of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso assembled by the merchants Shchukin and Morozov. The adjacent Gallery of European and American Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries now displays this collection permanently.