“Little Tretyakovka on the Volga” is the unofficial name of the Art and History Museum in the town of Kozmodemyansk named after its first director, Alexander Vladimirovich Grigoriev.
The main collection of the museum consists of works by famous Russian and Western European artists of the second half of the 19th — early 21st century.
The Volga-Kama traveling exhibition of 1918 marked the beginning of the art gallery. It included paintings by the Kazan artists Pavel Alexandrovich Radimov and Grigory Antonovich Medvedev.
Alexander Grigoriev worked on expanding the collection from 1919.
In recent years, the museum has acquired only paintings by Mari artists. The exhibition contains works by artists of different movements, which makes it possible to trace the stages of development of Russian fine arts from the first half of the 19th century to the 21st century.
The collection includes
paintings by such Russian artists as Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Vasily
Dmitrievich Polenov and many others, as well as paintings by Western European
masters.
