Ivanovo Local Museum of Arts

Ivanovo Local Art museum was opened in 1960. Its collection was compiled from works of art that had been kept in private collections of D.G. Burlykin - a factory owner and philanthropist, who created a Museum of curiosities and antiquities in Ivanovo-Voznesensk – and also of the factory owners Karentikovs and General Ruzsky. Collection of the museum is one of the biggest among all kept in Russian provincial museums: it consists of Art of antiquity, West-European Art of the 16th-20th centuries, Art of Eastern Countries, Russian Art, paintings, graphic arts, sculpture, lacquer miniature, scrimshaw, silver.

History of the Collection of Antiquities*:

The collection of antiquities from Ivanovo was created before the Revolution by a local amateur collector Dmitry G. Burlykin (1852-1924). It is a part of his huge collection of “antiquities and curiosities”. The first exposition of antiquities was located in the “Museum of Industry and Art”, which Burlykin built for his collection in 1915. In the Soviet times, when the museum was reorganized into Ivanovo-Voznesensk provincial local history museum, ancient exhibits formed an archaeological section. In 1960 the major part of them was transferred to a newly formed art museum.

There are about 500 original relics of Ancient Egyptian, Classical Greek and Ancient Roman culture, and exhibits from Greek cities of the Northern Black-Sea Region.

The Egyptian Collection:

Monuments of art and material culture of Ancient Egypt form the most ancient section of the exposition. Originality of the Ancient Egyptian art is determined by a close link between the Egyptian art and religious commitments. A mummy of a noble Egyptian woman that illustrates an important sector of material and spiritual culture of the Egyptians, connected with funeral cult, is one of the most interesting cultic monuments. Canopes and lids of canopes in form of a man’s and woman’s heads, dated back to the New Kingdom, and small faience funerary shabti-statuettes that, according to views of the Egyptians, could be called upon by the deceased to work for him in the Underworld rank among the funerary monuments.

Delicate alabaster vessels for toiletry date back to the Middle Kingdom. The Late Period of the Egyptian history, which is characterized by development of small-scale sculpture, is presented in the exposition of the Ivanovo museum by a few bronzes, the major part of that is dated from the 26th Sahidic dynasty. Statuettes of Osiris, Amon, Isis and other deities, of sacred animals (a head of a cat), amulets (Osiris) rank among them. It is necessary to make special mention of a Hellenistic alabaster statuette representing Isis with her son Horus on her knees, which was made by a very skilful author.