Odesa National Fine Arts Museum or Odesa National Art Museum is one of the principal art galleries of the city of Odesa in Ukraine. Founded in 1899, it occupies the Potocki Palace, itself a monument of early 19th century architecture. The museum now houses more than 10 thousand pieces of art, including paintings by some of the best-known Russian and Ukrainian artists of late 19th and early 20th century. It is the only museum in Odesa that has free entrance day every last Sunday of the month.
The palace that now houses the gallery is one of the oldest palaces of Odesa. It was ordered by Seweryn Potocki, a former member of the PolishSejm who after the partitions of Poland became supervisor of the Kharkiv University. Potocki was also a wealthy landowner and one of his properties, the village of Severinovka named after him contained a quarry of light limestone, from which both the palace and most of Odesa’s public buildings were built.
The construction started in 1805 and was supervised by Francesco Boffo, a noted Italian architect and the author of many palaces and public buildings in Odesa and the Crimea. Construction of the main building was ready by 1810, though due to Napoleonic Wars works on internal furnishing did not commence until 1824 and were finished by 1828.
The neoclassical building is a typical magnate residence of the epoch, with two floors, a large portico with a tympanum supported by six classical columns. The main building is joined to the side wings by semi-circular galleries, forming a Cour d’honneur in front of the palace. Behind it a small English-style landscape garden was created, with a romantic grotto. The interior design is mostly an eclectic mixture of various styles popular in early 19th century.
Seweryn Potocki, who died in 1829, did not see the palace completed. Instead, it was inherited by his distant relative, Olga Potocka, daughter to Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki. Potocka married Lev Naryshkin; although the palace remained her personal property, it is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Naryshkin Palace. In 1888 the building was sold to the mayor of Odesa, Grigorios Maraslis who then sold it in 1892 to the Odesa Society of Fine Arts. It took 9 more years to complete the first collection. Finally, Odesa Fine Arts Museum was opened on 6 November 1899. The core of the initial collection was formed by paintings donated to the museum by the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1920s, the museum was renamed Peoples Art Museum. After World War II, it was reopened as Odesa Art Gallery. It obtained its present name in 2021.
Under the National Art Museum located several void cellars and galleries, in one of which an underground grotto was built under the central part of the building. In the 1960th of the last century, specialists of Odesa restoration workshops based on historical documents carried out a fundamental restoration of the grotto. Today the grotto is accessible for visiting and is part of an excursion dedicated to the history of the palace.
