From the late 1860s Pavel Tretyakov began collecting and commissioning portraits of all the great figures in the cultural life of Russia. It was a fortunate coincidence that the era fron 1867 to 1914 was a remarkably creative one in literature, the theater, and music, as well as being the golden age of Russian portraiture. It enabled Tretyakov to put together a striking collection of masterpieces, which he later presented to the city of Moscow; today it is the State Tretyakov Museum. Now the Tretyakov Museum is exchanging for a time key portraits with Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. The Russians will be getting portraits of Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Jerome K. Jerome, and Charles Dickens, and London has received Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov. It is curious that Britain is including portraits of her greatest scientists Newton and Darwin, but Russia has not provided London with images of Lobachevsky, Mendeleev, Borodin, or Pavlov, men of comparable scientific achievement in their fields. Perhaps the Russians wanted to provide only the best of their portraits seen purely as art. As an exercise in wild imagination, consider what Braque could have done with Lobachevsky, Landseer with Pavlov’s dogs, or Mondrian with the periodic table of the elements.
For the visitor the exhibition provides two great opportunities. The first is the chance to view the works of gifted Russian artists, such as Ilia Repin, Valentin Serov, and Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, whose portraits are relatively unknown in the West, and to enjoy the products of