Музей В. К. Бялыніцкага-Бірулі, Art museum in Mahilyow, Belarus.
The Bialynicki-Birula Museum houses a collection of more than one hundred paintings and sketches by an important Belarusian artist. The works are displayed across two exhibition floors and showcase his artistic development and the range of subjects he explored.
The two-storey stone mansion on Leninskaya Street is a 17th-century Baroque monument of civil architecture. In May 1780 it lodged Austrian Emperor Joseph II during his meeting with Catherine II, then housed the Mogilev Noble Deputies' Assembly from 1815 to 1917. In 1918 it passed to the Karl Marx city library, was partly destroyed in the Great Patriotic War and rebuilt in the 1970s with a third floor added. The Byalynitsky-Birulya museum opened here on 24 December 1982.
The museum keeps the artist's personal belongings from his dacha "Chaika" on Lake Udomlya: an easel, palette, brushes, hunting rifle and Abramtsevo-made furniture, donated by his widow Elena Byalynitskaya-Birulya. Among the letters is one from Ilya Repin praising the young landscape painter's work. The attic hall hosts temporary exhibitions from the National Art Museum and the Belarusian Union of Artists.
The museum occupies a two-storey 17th-century stone mansion at 37 Leninskaya Street, with the memorial rooms on the ground floor and the paintings on the second; a wooden staircase at the centre of the plan links them. A third storey and roof were added in the 1970s, and the attic now holds a temporary exhibition hall. The museum closed for major repairs on 15 April 2013, so check before travelling.
The museum opened on 24 December 1982 as a branch of the National Art Museum of Belarus, making it the country's first memorial museum devoted to a painter. Its core holdings came from the National Museum's collection of nearly 500 works, gathered largely by director Elena Aladova, whom genealogists found to be the artist's cousin.
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