Chekhov and Dostoevsky portraits to be displayed in UK in 'unprecedented cultural exchange with Moscow'

Paintings of British icons including Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare will also be exhibited in the Russian capital

A painting of Anton Chekhov, which will go on display in London (PA)

Portraits of Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev are to go on display in the UK as part of an “unprecedented cultural exchange with Moscow”, it has been announced.

As part of the deal between the National Portrait Gallery and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, paintings of British icons including Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare will also be exhibited in the Russian capital.

The NPG said Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky would be the “most important exhibition of Russian portraits to ever take place in a British museum”.

The London gallery’s exhibition will open in March 2016, at the same time as Elizabeth to Victoria: British Portraits from the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery at the Tretyakov, one of Moscow’s two homes of Russian art.

The exhibitions are timed to mark the 160th anniversary of the founding of both galleries.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, said: “These two exhibitions in London and Moscow form an important act of cultural exchange for both institutions.” He called it the most “ambitious” exhibition of Russian portraiture in the UK.

A total of 26 portraits will travel from the Tretyakov also including paintings of composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky, and poet Anna Akhmatova.

Rosalind Blakesley, an NPG trustee Reader in Russian and European art at the University of Cambridge, has handpicked the Russian portraits after coming up with the idea for the exhibition five years ago.

She said: “We wanted to look at these 50 years when there was a creative and exciting relationships between writers and artists and musicians.”

The pictures rarely leave the gallery’s walls and are by some of Russia’s most acclaimed portrait artists from the past two centuries including Nikolai Ge and Ivan Kramskoy.

Among those to be displayed is the only portrait of the novelist Dostoevsky painted from life, while the work featuring Mussorgsky was painted just a few days before his death in a military hospital.

“The Dostoevsky portrait is in a very prominent place on their walls. We’re sending the ‘Chandos portrait’ of Shakespeare. These are both signals of intent of the seriousness and ambitions of the shows,” Dr Blakesley said.

Anna Akhmatova (PA)

The National Portrait Gallery will also loan portraits of Elizabeth I, writer Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Carlyle, one of the gallery’s founders.

Zelfira Tregulova, general director of the Tretyakov, said the exchange “signals the start of a bright new chapter in the history of cultural cooperation between our two countries”.

Dr Blakesley said: “I do firmly believe in cultural channels of communication, no matter how sticky the political situation, and this exemplifies what you can do.”

The past year has seen other major steps in cultural cooperation as political relations between the two countries remain strained.

Last December, the British Museum lent one of the Parthenon Marbles for the first time to the State Hermitage Museum mark the 250th anniversary of it founding.

The Science Museum in London is currently staging Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age about Russia’s space programme. It marks the first time most of the 150 exhibits have been outside Russia and some even had to be de-classified specially for the show.