State Museum of Palech Art

The main purpose of all museum expositions is to present Paleh as the center of folk culture of the XVII-XX centuries, to show the true meaning of a person living in the rural hinterland, his creative nature, his spirituality, loyalty to moral ideals.

The opening of the State Museum of Palekh Art took place on March 13, 1935, during the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Artel of Ancient Painting. The basis of the museum collection is the works of artists of Palekh lacquer miniature. In the collection of this unique collection, a significant role belonged to the first director of GMPI German Vasilyevich Zhidkov. By his order, the museum received a large number of works on the Pushkin theme, performed by leading Palekh artists. The best among them are the plate The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish of I.I. Zubkov, the Tale of the Golden Cockerel of I.M. Bakanov, the box The Tale of Tsar Saltan A.V. Kotukhin, Besa I.P. Vakurov. Currently, about two thousand of the best works of Palekh masters are stored in museum funds.

In the 1930s, a collection of ancient Russian painting began to form, and a department of pre-revolutionary Palekh art was created. Its funds were replenished as a result of numerous scientific expeditions organized by the museum staff in the Ivanovo region. Thus, in the State Museum of Palekh Art there were ancient works of Rostov-Suzdal iconography: Nicholas the Wonderworker with the life of the end of the XIV century and the Annunciation of the beginning of the XV century. The basis of the ancient Russian collection of GMPI are icons of Palekh letters of the XVII-XX centuries. Today in the art collection of the ancient Russian department of the GMPI there are about a thousand icons, more than 1.5 thousand units of iconographic graphics, objects of folk applied art (copper and silver salaries, copper casting, spinning wheels, fabrics, wooden carvings).

Among the exhibits of the State Museum of Palekh Art are works of Russian and Western European painting. These are paintings by Italian, Dutch, Flemish, German masters of the XVI-XIX centuries, as well as the works of Russian painters of the second half of the XIX - first half of the XX century: Rybak I.A. Pelevin, Landscape with F.A. Vasilyev clouds, Ust-Kaiva P. Vereshchagin, Portrait of a girl of an unknown Russian artist of the second half of the XIX century, portraits of peasants Mishurov academician painting N.N. Kharlamov. The GMPI holds one of the most significant collections of painting, representing the work of Alexei and Andrei Korin.