

The Russian Museum holds one of Russia's leading collections of icons and Old Russian applied art. A start was made to this collection back in 1898, when the museum was founded. Acquisitions made in the 1900s and early 1910s were of enormous significance for the collection.The collection was added to in the years following the revolution by acquisitons made through the Museum Fund, as well as directly from churches and monasteries. Later, particularly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, regular expeditions of museum research assistants and restorers were organized to gather works of Old Russian art. These became an important source of new acquistions.The collection currently includes some 6,000 icons and roughly the same number of works of Old Russian applied art, ranging from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries.
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