The exhibition “Russian and Soviet Art: 18th–20th Centuries” of the Irbit State Museum of Fine Arts is truly unique because of the quality and variety of its exhibits. It takes up 13 halls in the Museum of Engraving and Drawing.
The new history of Russian
printmaking began during the reign of Peter the Great with the arrival of the
Dutch engraver Adriaan Schoonebeck who founded an engraving workshop in Russia.
The exhibition features works by the first professional Russian engravers, such
as Alexey Zubov, Ivan Sokolov, Yevgraf Chemesov, and Kozma Chesky. It also
includes masterful engravings by Nikolay Utkin, an etching by Orest Kiprensky,
an ink drawing by Fyodor Tolstoy, and lithographs by Alexander Orlovsky,
Mikhail Zatsepin, and Pyotr Borel. The exhibition includes works by famous
representatives of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, such as Alexey
Savrasov, Isaac Levitan, Nikolai Ge, Ivan Shishkin, and Vasily Polenov. The
museum takes pride in the prints made at the turn of the 20th century by such artists as Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, Apollinariy Vasnetsov,
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Sergey Sudeikin, as well as
a female portrait in pencil by Philip Malyavin. The paintings by Soviet realist
artists — Iosif Gurvich, Vasily Zhuravlyov, and Boris Parkhunov — also deserve special
attention.
Exhibits are marked with AR stickers for identification purposes.
