Mikhailovsky Palace / State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (must see)

Mikhailovsky Palace is a former grand-ducal residence that today serves as the principal building of the State Russian Museum. It was constructed between 1819 and 1825 for Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, the youngest son of Emperor Paul I, to designs by architect Carlo Rossi. Rossi conceived the palace as the center of a larger Empire-style ensemble that also included the adjoining square, garden, service wings, and the avenue linking the palace with Nevsky Prospekt.

Much of the palace was altered when it was converted into a museum, but several important nineteenth-century interiors survive. The most notable is the White Hall, which remained largely untouched during the museum reconstruction of the 1890s, while Rossi’s grand staircase and elements of the original ceremonial layout also preserve the character of the former residence. In 1895, Emperor Nicholas II signed the decree establishing the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III and assigning the recently acquired Mikhailovsky Palace to the new institution. After adaptation by architect Vasily Svinin, the museum opened to the public on March 19, 1898 (March 7 Old Style). The Russian Museum holds more than 450,000 works spanning Russian art from medieval icons to the twenty-first century. The Mikhailovsky Palace concentrates particularly on Old Russian, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century art, with works by Karl Bryullov, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ilya Repin, Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Surikov, Viktor Vasnetsov, and many other major artists. Among its best-known paintings are Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii and Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga.

The palace therefore combines the setting of a former Romanov residence with one of the world’s largest collections of Russian art. Its galleries allow visitors to follow the development of Russian painting, sculpture, and icon art while also encountering surviving elements of Rossi’s original nineteenth-century architectural design.