Khazine Gallery

The Khazine Gallery, the largest collection of painting, graphic art and sculpture in Tatarstan, operates as a division of the republic’s Museum of Fine Arts. The gallery occupies a historic building within the Kazan Kremlin and brings together more than two centuries of the region’s art history under one roof.

The building where the gallery now stands was constructed in the 1840s as barracks for military cantonists to a design by the architect Pyotr Pyatnitsky, whose plan was personally amended by Emperor Nicholas I. From 1861 the building housed a military school, reorganised five years later into a Cadet School, and in 1874 a third storey was added and the façades were plastered. After nearly a century of military use, the building was restored in the mid-1990s and adapted for museum purposes, and in 2005, for the millennium of Kazan, the National Art Gallery opened here as a division of the republic’s Museum of Fine Arts.

The elongated building is executed in the forms of late Russian Classicism — a symmetrical layout and a severe, monumental façade with almost no ornament, betraying its barracks origins rather than a museum design. The second and third floors are given over to the permanent exhibition, displaying around two thousand works from the republic’s museum holdings, while the ground floor houses temporary exhibition halls. Next door, in another building of the same Kremlin complex, the Hermitage-Kazan Centre and the Museum of Natural History of Tatarstan operate today.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically — from masters of the Kazan art school of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the avant-garde of the 1920s–1930s, which specialists consider one of the jewels of the collection. Several halls are devoted to Nikolai Fechin, a Kazan native whose early works, including the 1914 ‘Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya’, are held here. Separate spaces are given to Baki Urmanche, founder of professional Tatar fine art, whose career is traced from the Impressionism of the 1920s to the decorative manner of his later years, and to the Soviet-era painter Kharis Yakupov.

Today the Khazine Gallery is one of the draws on the tourist route through the Kremlin: it is open most days of the week, with extended hours on Thursdays, and welcomes both individual visitors and tour groups. Besides the permanent collection, temporary exhibitions of contemporary Tatarstan artists are held here regularly, so the gallery functions not only as a repository of classical heritage but also as an active exhibition venue.

By housing the republic’s largest collection of fine art within the walls of a former military barracks, Kazan gained a gallery that visibly links the Kremlin’s architectural history with two centuries of development in the Tatar and Russian art of the Volga region.