The Taganrog Museum of Fine Arts collection is one of the best art collections in the South of Russia. It was the great writer and humanist Anton Chehov who first expressed the idea of having such a museum. It took 115 years for the Taganrog Museum of Fine Arts to assume its present-day shape. Its collection comprises about 7 thousand paintings, drawings, water-colors, prints, sculpture, objects of decorative and applied art.

    One of the largest components of the Museum is a collection of paintings by Russian eighteenth - to twentieth-century artists which includes the works of Fiodor Rokotov, Vasily Tropinin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Alexei Savrasov, Ivan Shishkin, Konstantin Makovsky, Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov, Vasily Vereshchagin, Vasily Surikov, Isaak Levitan, Konstantin Korovin and others. Thanks to its unique collection every year the Museum takes part in art exhibitions organized in Russia and abroad.

    The Taganrog Museum of Fine Arts is a favorite place of the inhabitants and guests of Taganrog. The Museum occupies the cosy, chamber living rooms of an old mansion built in the last third of the nineteenth century and has kept its historic appearance intact. The facade and interiors of this splendid piece of architecture in Taganrog help the spectator to feel flavour of the past. The Museum's refined inside court makes an indelible impression on the visitor. An uncommon attraction of this place is its so-called "exposition under the open sky" which contains splendid samples of the nineteenth-century Italian marble sculpture