The lecture will be devoted to the phenomenon of 19th-century Rembrandt prints collecting in Russia, discussing three major figures – geographer, man of law and an amateur etcher, all of them - from the Russian hereditary gentry. All three of them were born in old Russian capital, the city of Moscow, all three spent a lot of time abroad but the nature of their collecting seems to be quite different. Senators Petr Semenov-Tjan-Shansky (1827-1914) and Dmitry Rovinsky (1824-1895) being on the state service from their early years, are famous as an active participants of the Great Reforms of Alexander II (1861-1864), acting in the process of liberation of peasants from serfdom, elimination of legal corporal punishment and establishing an institution of jury trial in the absolute monarchy of Russia. The third hero of the lecture, hereditary collector Nikolai Mosolov (1846-1914), who multiplied the collection of his father and grandfather, was a freelancer etcher, Rembrandt fan, who could allow himself to devote all his life to the art of printmaking. Their collection had a very different fate. The ones created by Rovinsky and Mosolov (today, respectively, in the Hermitage at St Petersburg and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow by the will of collectors) are preserved in relative intact. Rembrandts (as well as Durers) from Semenov collection, which was sold by him directly to the Imperial Hermitage (1910), were mostly sold by the Soviet government in late 1920s. How these three assembled their collections in Russia and in Europe, how they used them and how they studied them will be the main topic of talk on April 22, 2021.

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