Tarusian Art Gallery

Tarus Art Gallery was founded in 1963, since 1968 - a branch of the Kaluga Regional Art Museum.

The basis of the collection of the gallery was the collection of Russian, Western European painting, graphics and decorative and applied arts by the Moscow agronomist, the famous collector Nikolai Petrovich Rakitsky (1883-1975), which he presented to Tarusa. The collector donated two hundred objects of painting, porcelain, faience, glass, fragments of ancient lace to the gallery. The collection also included works by famous domestic masters: K. Bryullov, I. Aivazovsky, B. Kustodiev, M. Vrubel, A. Ostroumov-Lebedeva.

The gallery collection was consistently replenished with works transferred from the Directorate of Art Funds of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR. In 1963, more than forty works of leading masters of Soviet fine arts were transferred from the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation to the funds of the gallery. In the future, the collection was replenished with various kinds of receipts, most of which were gifts of Kaluga and Moscow artists, whose life and activities are associated with Tarusa.

The collection of the gallery consists of works by domestic and Western European masters. Academic fine art prevails (G.G. Gagarin, A.M. Volkov, S.K. Zaryanko, I.K. Aivazovsky, L.F. Lagorio, etc.) and realistic painting of Peredvizhniki artists (V.D. Polenov, S.L. Svetoslavsky, P.A. Sukhodolsky, A.L. Rzhevskaya, etc.). Fine art of the XX century is represented mainly by paintings by Kaluga and Moscow artists (I.A. Starzhenetskaya, N.N. Vatolina, M.A. Birstein, E.G. Bragovsky, N.I. Nesterova, Yu.D. Korovin, A.M. Birshtein, Y.V. Aleksandrov, etc.).

A distinctive feature of the Tarus collection is the body of works of the largest domestic sculptor-animalist V.A. Vatagin and his students D Gorlov and A. Komarov, which allowed to create a department of animalistic sculpture and graphics as part of the stationary exposition. Since the end of the XIX century for many masters of Russian art Tarus was a kind of Barbizon. The creative heritage of artists who at different times lived in Tarus, in the collection is represented by the works of V. Polenov, V. Borisov-Musatov, A. Rzhevskaya, F. Bogorodsky, A. Grigoriev, V. Zhuravlev, N. Krymov, N. Terpsikhorov, N. Romadin, V. Byalinitsky-Birul.

The collection of works by modern masters of fine art includes works by M. Birstein, A. Birstein, E. Bragovsky, I. Starzhenetskaya, Y. Alexandrov, N. Vatolina, E. Rachev, A. Volkov.

On the artistic life of the Kaluga Territory in the XX century, the works of V. Lyubimov, V. Sobinkov, Y. Epishin, A. Konyashin, E. Kitaikin, L. Klimentovskaya, A. Kotelnikov, V. Gorchakov, E. Shcherbakov, and Pavlishak give a fairly integral idea.

Western European painting is represented by a few examples of Italian, Dutch, French, Swiss masters of the XVI – XIX centuries (circle artist N. Aluno, F. Wauverman, F. Casanova, A. Kalam, etc.) from the collection of N. P. Rakitsky.