2 . P E T I T
P A L A I S
AVENUE WINSTON CHURCHILL
Art Museum Riga Bourse was opened in 2011 in the
building of the Venetian palazzo of the Renaissance ,
built according to the project of St . Petersburg
architect Harald Julius von Bosse in 1855 . In 2013 ,
the museum entered the top 8 of the most
successful museums , opened in this decade . The
museum has 4 permanent exhibitions .
The history of the museum begins in 1920 , when the
State Art Museum was founded . After the Second
World War , two collections of foreign art were
exhibited in the modern Latvian National Art
Museum and in the Riga Castle .
At the heart of the collection are works of art
collected by the Riga Rata at the end of the 18th
and beginning of the 19th century . In the collection
of the museum about 1000 paintings predominantly
Dutch painting of the XVII century and the German
XIX century .
Most of the collection is a collection of graphics ,
drawings and watercolors , which numbers about
10 , 000 units . Of particular interest are collections of
engraving on copper , woodcuts , lithographs and
various types of printing . Thanks to interest in the
exotic countries of the 19th century collectors , the
museum has a large collection of Far Eastern
graphics and works of art .
The museum also presents a collection of
sculptures , collected in the XX century by the State
Art Museum . The meeting was regularly replenished
from the Kurzeme province due to purchases and
donations . In the 1950s the museum received gifts
from the Latvian University , namely ancient
Egyptian and antique sculptures . Within the
framework of the cultural exchange between the
socialist republics , valuable objects from the
collection of the St . Petersburg Hermitage were
received as gifts .