Of Paintings and Icons

So, as we aren’t really doing anything today (and frankly, I say thank God) I’m just going to write about yesterday’s excursion to the Третьяковская Галерея, an art museum close to the center of Moscow (I think.  This is a rough guess based on how far we went on the metro, and what I could see in the distance.)  Now, art museums I know, gratis a mother who was very fond of dragging her children to any art museum she could and forcing us to wander through them for hours on end.  Sometimes this was fine, like when we went to a Degas exhibition when I was seven or eight, and.... other times it ended in two seriously bored and annoyed children under the age of twelve.  Actually, it usually ended in two seriously bored and annoyed children under the age of twelve.  The end result is that while I have grown to appreciate art museums more in the past few years, I am still very wary of them and have a tendency to ignore a good chunk of the art in favor of what pieces interest me.  I’m not very happy when I don’t get to do this.  
Guess what?  When your teacher is giving you a guided tour, and he’s running on a limited time frame, you don’t get to wander around at your own pace and pick your paintings.  
The Tretyakov Gallery (as it’s called in English) is smaller than most art museums that I’ve visited.  Perhaps that’s why it’s a gallery instead of a museum.  I’m a little hazy on the historical details, but if I remember correctly, it was originally someone’s private art collection, which has since grown through donations and the like.  It has some really interesting pieces, including several more prominent Васнецов originals.  This would be paintings like “Богатыри” and “Иван-Царевич на Сером Волке”.  I think “Витязь на рапусте” is there as well.  All the same, some very nice Васнецов paintings.  Of course, there were a lot of other paintings as well, especially religious icons.  Icons are very important in Russian, because of the Orthodox church.  A lot of them are really beautiful, and fully meriting of their own portion of the gallery.  We didn’t focus on them very much, which despite the similarity between most of them, is a bit of a shame.  Still, it was nice to wander around an art museum and take in the art.  I just wish that I could have wandered around on my own for a while, without having to worry about keeping up with the rest of the group.  
By the time Владимир Алексеевич had to leave, Susan and Katie were pretty much done.  Carley and I both had things we wouldn’t have minded going back to see again, but we were getting towards the end of our ropes as well.  So, we ended up leaving early.  I did get some nifty things at the museum store, as they were incredibly cheap, and I hold out hope that the Третьяковская Галерея will be on the list of museums that offer free admission to students on the third Sunday of the month so I can go in and take a look around on my own.  Maybe I could get a better look at those Васнецов paintings, and some of those icons.....


By the by, I finished Game of Thrones.  It wasn’t all that long, and no, I didn’t ignore Moscow for it.  Blogging, very possibly, but not Moscow.  On another side note, I have concluded that I will probably be writing on this after I return to the US.  Such is the price of not blogging consistently.