Lviv National Museum


The Lviv National Museum is one of Ukraine's largest museums, dedicated to Ukrainian culture in all its manifestations. It was established by Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky in 1905 and was originally known as the Lwow Ecclesiastical Museum. It currently bears Sheptytsky's name.

History

The founder donated some 10,000 items to the museum and raised the funds required for its maintenance. An extravagant Neo-Baroque villa was acquired to house the collections.
After the World War II, the museum was renamed the Lviv Museum of Ukrainian Art. The collection was augmented by adding a number of exhibits confiscated from other Lviv museums. By the late 20th century, the museum's holdings of Ukrainian icons and folk art were the largest in the country.
The National Museum now occupies the ornate building of the former Lviv Industrial Museum, which housed the Lenin Museum in Soviet times. A cluster of memorial houses and the Sokalshchina Museum in Chervonohrad are affiliated with the National Museum.

Collection

Icon-paintings of which there are at least 4000 of form an important part of the collection as does folk sacral sculpture. A set of Ukrainian folk and professional engravings dating back to the 17th and 18th century's are of great value to the museum from a Ukrainian cultural viewpoint and there are over 1000 in this department. The museum has paintings by artists such as Johann Georg Pinsel, Ivan Rutkovych, Serhii Vasylkivsky, Antin Manastyrsky, Ivan Trush, Olena Kulchytska, Mykhailo Boychuk, Jakiw Hnizdowskyj, Oleksa Hryshchenko, Liuboslav Hutsaliuk, Vasyl Krychevsky, Michał Filewicz and others.
The National Museum of Lviv also has a number of important manuscripts, some of them very rare such as Cracow publications by Schweipolt Fiol, Prague and Vienna printings by Francysk Skaryna, and virtually all of Ivan Fedorov's publications.