Sergei Shchukin
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Sergei Shchukin, (1854 – 1936), was a Russian businessman who became a collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, following a trip to Paris in 1897, when he bought his first Monet. He later bought numerous works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, among others. These paintings decorated the walls of his palatial home in Moscow.
Shchukin was particularly notable for his long association with Matisse, who decorated his mansion and created one of his iconic paintings, La Danse, specially for Shchukin. The collection also featured about hundred choice works by Pablo Picasso, including most of his earliest Cubust works, such as Three Women and major landscapes, but some key pieces of the Blue and Rose periods as well. In 1909, Shchukin opened his home on Sundays for public viewings, introducing French avant-garde painting to the Muscovites.
After the 1917 Revolution, the government appropriated his collection, while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died. In 1948 his collection, which by then had been combined with Ivan Morozov’s to form the State Museum of New Western Art, was divided between the State Pushkin Museum and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
