Tatiana Vitalievna Yudenkova,
Doctor of Art History, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia; Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Moscow Merchants and Patrons Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov: Factory and Trade Activities in Moscow and Kostroma in the 1860–1880s
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-5-9
Little was known for a long time about the entrepreneurial activities of the Moscow merchant brothers Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov, the founders of the Tretyakov Gallery. The sole exception was the book of memoirs of P.M. Tretyakov’s daughter, in which, based on archival documents, it was first told about the trade and factory activities of her father and uncle, as well as about the trade of her great-grandfather and grandfather. The historiography on this topic is still small. In recent years, a new block of archival materials has become available to the author of the article (GAKO, OR GTG, RGIA, CIAM), which allowed to expand the idea of the first steps of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov in the field of entrepreneurship development, and to introduce new information into scientific circulation for further more accurate reconstruction of their trade and factory business. From a young age, the Tretyakovs were involved in the business life of the merchant class, they had a wide range of contacts formed with the Tretyakovs’ entry into public life and into city administration. The formation of their worldview was undoubtedly influenced by the “Moscow” way of thinking and Slavophile ideas. Following the precepts of their father, they quickly brought the trading business to a new level. They went from modest shops in Gostiny Dvor to the establishment of a Trading House and a “Shop of Linen, Paper and Wool goods of Russian and Foreign” on Ilyinka, and then in 1866 they entered production, establishing a New Kostroma Linen Manufactory (NCLM), which operated until nationalization in 1918. The little-known history of Pavel Tretyakov’s creation and acquisition of the painting “Ipatievsky Monastery near Kostroma” (1861, GTG) by A.P. Bogolyubov raises several important questions that could shed light on the missing links in the history of the foundation of the NCLM. A number of archival documents stored in the RGIA reveal the difficulties encountered by the Tretyakovs during the construction of the first factory buildings. The uneven, unstable development of the Tretyakov linen production can be traced through scattered archival documents, confirming the opinion of one of the experts of the All-Russian Art and Industrial Exhibition of 1882, as well as letters from P.M. Tretyakov himself. The new documents clarify many facts of the history of the creation of a Trading House, a Store on Ilyinka and NKLM in the initial period of existence in the 1860s–1880s.
Publishing: 28/10/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 18/07/2023
How to cite: Yudenkova T.V. Moscow Merchants and Patrons Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov: Factory and Trade Activities in Moscow and Kostroma in the 1860–1880s // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 5 (31), pp. 131–146. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-5-09.pdf]
Links: Issue 5 2023
Keywords: entrepreneurship; merchants; Moscow; Kostroma; New Kostroma Linen Manufactory; painting by A.P. Bogolyubov; Tretyakov collectors