After visiting the museum, Mr Medvedev discussed the funding of museums with Museum Director Nikolai Tretyakov and Chief Curator Marina Flit. The President noted, in particular, the need to clarify procedures for providing budget financing to museums and procedures for raising money from private investors. Mr Medvedev said that the opening of the Russian State Hermitage Museum branch in Amsterdam, the Hermitage on the Amstel, on June 20, is an example of how every big Russian museum should have its own endowment to help it to carry out its work.
The President signed the Book of Honorary Guests: “It gives me a special feeling to be here at the Pavlovsk Park and Palace. Our forebears’ unique vision and the restorers’ and curators’ outstanding work have made Pavlovsk a world-class museum and park complex. Thank you to everyone who has worked here today and in the past.”
The Pavlovsk Park and Palace was the summer residence of Emperor Paul I and his family. It was built in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries. It is home to one of Europe’s biggest and most beautiful landscaped parks with an area of 600 hectares. The estate’s owners travelled Europe in 1781–1782, visiting renowned workshops and studios, where they bought and ordered paintings, furniture, bronze ornaments, silks, porcelain ware. They brought back with them numerous antiquities from Italy and also received gifts from the Royal houses of Europe. This all laid the foundations for the museum’s present collection.
The collection also includes magnificent examples of Russian portrait-painting, landscapes and drawings of the different views around Pavlovsk. Its backbone is the numerous items of decorative and applied arts and painting from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: paintings, engravings, water colours, drawings, decorative and applied arts, and furniture.
Chief Curator of Pavlovsk Park Marina Flit received the 2008 Russian National Award for her outstanding contribution to the preservation of the world cultural heritage and the revival of a unique monument of landscape art.
Mr Medvedev’s mother worked at the Palace and Park Museum as a guide in the past, and the President often visited Pavlovsk when he was a child.