In spite of the paucity of paintings, the Moscow Kremlin Museum’s collection is of big historical and cultural value. It is connected with the Kremlin’s life of more than three centuries. The chronological frames of the collection embrace the time from the Late Middle Ages till nowadays.

The monuments from the Kremlin’s cathedrals and monasteries with church scenes, such as portraits of the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, give the idea of various genres and geographic areas. The museum funds include paintings by Dutch, German, French artists of XVII-XX centuries that filled the collection in the Soviet period. At that time the collection was also filled with battle scenes with episodes from the military history of our country, architectural landscapes by F.Ya. Alexeev, M.N. Vorobyov and N.I. Podklyuchnikov, which present the Kremlin’s look in the XIX century. Paintings with historical scenes are a interesting part of the collection. Two depictions of the Kremlin of the mid XIX century painted by I.K. Aivazovsky to the memory of the Napoleon’s invasion - “The 1812 fire in Moscow” and “The Kremlin’s panorama with a view to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour” - belong to the greatest creations of this kind.

The series of six canvases glorifying the feats of Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky is a valuable monument of the Russian culture of the XIX century. It was created by artist F.A. Moller for the Alexander Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace on the order of Emperor Alexander II.

The key items of the collection are paintings that adorned the halls of the Armoury Chamber in the XIX-early XX centuries. The most significant paintings forming the idea of the Armoury Chamber’s display before the 1917 Revolution were the depictions of Russian Princes, Tsars and Emperors, who personified the history of the National Statehood. That is why portraits of Russian rulers form the major part of the pictorial collection. Among the copies, painted from originals by great masters of the XVIII-XIX centuries, we should mark high artistic qualities of “The portrait of Emperor Peter I” by J.G.Tannauer, and “The portrait of Catherine I” painted by an unknown artist in the first quarter of the XVIII century. This section of the collection presents the blackbone line of the development and life of ceremonial representative portraits in the Russian culture of the XVIII-XIX centuries.