Main Prints Collection

It was established in the late 1840s by the architect V. Sobolshchikov, the curator of the Art Department. The collection was closed to new material in the 1860s; that is, no more works were to be added to it.

The collection includes engravings and lithographs dated from the 16th to the first half of the 19th centuries. The plates is arranged by national artistic schools: German, Dutch, French, Italian and Russian. The most numerous proved to be Dutch prints of the 16th - 17th centuries, which count 3,632 items. Outstanding among them are the works by the sixteenth-century painters and printmakers Lucas van Leyden, Hendrick Goltzius, Dirk Coornhert, Pieter van der Heyden, Cornelius Cort and others produced burin engravings and etchings with classical, biblical and allegorical subjects.

The German school, numbering 2,216 items, is mainly represented through woodcuts and metal engravings of the 16th - 18th centuries by artists of the Renaissance period, most notably Albrecht Dtirer, Lucas Cranach, Barthel Beham and Hans Burgkmaier and others. The Russian part of the collection comprises only 382 items. These are mainly, engravings from the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries and lithographs of the 1830s – 1840s.

The works by little-known printmakers form a separate section, prints by unknown engravers are arranged by subject.

 

Prints & Photographs Collections

Prints & Photographs. Brief Summary

Collections