Exhibition "Battles and Heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812"

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Khabarovsk Krai Museum named after N.I. Grodekov present the second joint exhibition project - the exhibition "Battles and heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812. Monuments from the numismatics department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts", dedicated to the 210th anniversary of the victory in the Patriotic War.

The numismatic objects provided by the State Museum of Fine Arts and rare publications from the scientific library, exhibited outside the museum for the first time, are supplemented by weapons and plaster medallions from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Far Eastern Art Museum.

The exhibition features 80 exhibits, many of which viewers are seeing for the first time.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at well-known historical events. The exhibition includes personal belongings of the participants of the memorable battles, which they used both in peacetime and wartime: stamps and weapons. Personal seals served the participants in the Patriotic War of 1812 to protect property rights and the inviolability of private correspondence, and weapons helped them defend the freedom and the future of the country.

Especially rare is the opportunity for the public to see a dozen and a half unique works of stone-carving art such as personal seals. The seal of Prince Pyotr Bagration (1765-1812) is a masterpiece that he used in the last years of his life and may not have parted with it during the Battle of Borodino.

At the exhibition you can see the awards of the heroes of World War II. The exhibition features various award medals and orders. Among them stands out the Order of St. George, the main military decoration of the Russian Empire. Of particular interest are the insignia of the Order of St. George or the Crosses of St. George instituted by Emperor Alexander I in 1807 in Tilsit (now the town of Sovetsk in the Kaliningrad region). Such crosses were awarded only for bravery and courage. The rarest of them all - the cross for Prussian soldiers of the Allied army - can also be seen at the exhibition.

The battles of 1812-1814 are represented by medals and plaster medallions created by a contemporary of these events - Count Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy (1783-1873). He was an unorthodox man who left his military career for the sake of art, for which he was excommunicated from secular society. However, his talent and hard work made the count a famous painter and sculptor, the best medallist of the first half of the 19th century.

A large part of the exposition is occupied by commemorative medals in honor of individual regiments of the Russian army and badges of the servicemen who served in them. On the commemorative medals one can see the names of settlements where soldiers were especially distinguished in battles, including Borodino. As for badges, they were made only in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries and sometimes copy the awards of the Alexandrov time.

Among the exhibits of the exhibition stands out a tambourstaff from the collection of the HKM - a wand of a military conductor, decorated with a commemorative inscription in honor of the victory of the Allied armies in the "Battle of the Nations" near Leipzig on October 16-19, 1813. This object is a reminder that war heroes went into battle to the sound of military bands, whose musicians not only played marches - they themselves took part in the hostilities, contributing to the victory over the enemy.

Synopsis:

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is a museum complex with one of Russia's largest art collections of foreign art.

The museum has about 700 original works created by masters from ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to the present day. In the main building of the museum you can see the iconic works of world painting - works by Rembrandt, P.P. Rubens, Botticelli, Canaletto, N. Poussin, masters of the Northern Renaissance and other prominent artists. A separate place in the collection takes the collection of French art of the XIX-XX centuries, collected by Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Presented with iconic works by C. Monet, P. Renoir, P. Cezanne, P. Gauguin, W. van Gogh, A. Matisse, P. Picasso and other masters, this collection is one of the most famous in the world. The museum's collections continue to be actively replenished. In 2018, as part of the "Pushkin XXI" direction, the museum began to form Russia's first collection of media art.

Tickets cost 300 rubles (with the ability to visit all the halls of the Main Building)