The Regional Art Museum in Ulyanovsk is a unique repository of objects that "tell" about the culture of the Volga region. It is often called a small Hermitage. The exposition is located in the historical building - Ivan Goncharov’s House. It was built in the early 20th century on the occasion of centenary of the writer's birth.
The Regional Art Museum traces its history back to 1895. It started as a department of the Museum of the Simbirsk provincial scientific archival commission. In 1917, its funds were substantially enriched owing to the nationalized art collections of local nobles, merchants and industrialists, and in the 1930s the Hermitage, the Pushkin House and the State Museum Fund “shared” with it. The museum collection includes more than 11 thousand exhibits from different eras: Russian painting, several canvases of Dutch and Spanish artists, graphics, sculpture, as well as German, French, Russian porcelain, antique ceramics and furniture. Here you can see the works by Rokotov, Bryullov, Levitsky, Borovikovsky, Makovsky and Plastov.