The Chuvash State Art Gallery was founded in 1939 as a separate establishment from the fine arts department of the Museum of Local Lore. Its collection comprised 293 works of painting, graphics, sculpture and applied and decorative arts, created by Chuvash, Russian and Soviet artists.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the gallery’s collection was mothballed. For about three years, they were kept in the Assumption Church, however, despite the move, the gallery continued to work, holding exhibitions of local artists and evacuees in the parks, the “Rodina” cinema, the House of the Red Army, and the theater. The gallery reopened to visitors on September 1, 1944, in the former residence of the Bonnays (Talantsevs). In 1972, the museum received the mansion that used to belong to the merchant Fyodor Yefremov.
In 1985, Cheboksary hosted the Sixth Regional Exhibition “The Big Volga”. On the eve of this event, a new three-story building was built for the museum according to the project of the architect Vladimir Shatilov.
The gallery was renamed the Chuvash State Art Museum. The new building houses a permanent exhibition of Chuvash painting, and the old “Yefremov” mansion houses works of Russian and Western European art of the 17th — early 20th centuries. In 1990, The opening of a new branch of the museum — the Moisey Spiridonov Memorial Museum-Apartment — took place in 1990. In 1996, the museum received the Exhibition Hall (now the Center for Contemporary Art).
Currently, the museum’s collection includes about 30,000 works — masterpieces of Russian, Soviet and world art, created by such artists as Vasily Tropinin, Konstantin Korovin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Zinaida Serebryakova, Nicolai Fechin, and Anatoly Mittov. The museum has preserved the paintings, valuable for the true depiction of the Chuvash, and unique examples of national applied art.
