After Moscow and Yekaterinburg, our travelling exhibition Tsarskoe Selo: Masterpieces of the Imperial Residence has arrived in Nizhny Novgorod. The city at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga rivers in Central Russia will house our masterpieces until 14 February 2027.
Supported by Russia's Ministry of Culture, the exhibition is open at the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum with 300 artefacts including many unique memorial objects from the museum's core collection, as well as some newly added thanks to generous donations from our museum's friends.
The exhibits illustrate the history of the Tsarskoe Selo palaces, parks and pavilions from the eighteenth century to the present day. The first decades of the imperial estate are reflected in watercolours and lithographs.
For the first time Nizhny sees the Touch and Smell, one of the original four mid-seventeenth-century Florentine mosaics by the workshop of Lodovico Sieries, that graced the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace before 1941. Looted by the Nazis, the mosaic is so far the only one found and returned to Tsarskoe Selo in 2000. It is usually preserved in the museum's storage and rarely put on display.
The other sections of the exhibition showcase artistic bronze, glass, silver and porcelain pieces; paintings; objects decorated with semi-precious stones like Ural malachite, rhodonite, jasper, lapis lazuli, jade and porphyry; as well as seventeenth- to nineteenth-century objects of lacquer, enamel, wood, stone and porcelain from China and Japan.
Also noteworthy are several pieces from our collection of amber, including an amber medallion with a portrait of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, seventeenth-century amber boxes and board games, Emperor Alexander II's personal amber smoking pipes, and other objects of daily life.
