The Tarusa Art Gallery is located in a two-storey house attached closely to the Peter and Paul Cathedral. It was established in 1963, and since 1968 it has become a branch of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts. Here you can see interesting collections of paintings by Russian artists, many of them lived in Tarusa.
The Tarusa Art Gallery was founded by Nikolai Rakitsky. He is an agronomist from Moscow, who often came to Tarusa for the summer. He was a well-known art collector and donated his collection to the museum he founded in Tarusa.
In the early years, Rakitsky`s collection was kept in the premises of the House of Pioneers. It was located in the former Peter and Paul Cathedral of Tarusa, which the Bolsheviks closed in the 1930s, but the building was not destroyed. However, already in 1967, two-storey building was constructed for gallery. It was attached to the building of the former cathedral. When the temple was returned to the church in 1999, a plan was considered to dismantle the gallery and build it in another place, however, this was not done for technical reasons.
The Tarusa Art Gallery has an interesting collection of animal artists, wooden sculptures, watercolors, pictures of famous Russian artists such as Polenov, Aivazovsky and others. The permanent exhibition is located in the Rakitsky Hall and the Vatagin Hall.
In the gallery you can see 11 works by the contemporary avant-garde artist Eduard Steinberg. He lived in Tarusa and died here in 2012. The gallery also has works by the artist Borisov-Musatov, who lived in Tarusa at the beginning of the 20th century.
