It was the leading art critic Vladimir Stasov who came up with and carried out the idea of creating the Petrine Gallery of all the graphic material relating to Peter the Great.
The collection comprises Russian engravings from the first quarter of the eighteenth century: portraits of Peter the Great and his contemporaries, scenes of land and sea battles, victory celebrations and views of Moscow and St Petersburg. A large part of the engravings from the Petrine era consists of impressions specially taken for the Public Library in 1851 from all the plates stored in the General Staff archive. A number of very rare prints was transferred to the gallery from the collections of Mikhail Pogodin and Adam Olsufyev.
The most valuable part of the collection is made up of original prints by the engravers of the time of Peter the Great - Alexey Zubov, Pieter Pickaerdt, Adriaan Schoonebeck and others. Among them, a unique portrait of Peter the Great, made by Schoonebeck in the early 1700s.
The collection numbers 1, 153 items.
Prints & Photographs Collections
Prints & Photographs. Brief Summary
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