In December 1998, two local collectors, Jacob and Joseph Rzhevsky, presented their rich collection of art to the Russian Museum. Comprising painting, graphic art, sculpture, decorative and applied art, this unique collection was lovingly put together by the two brothers over half a century. The donation consists of 503 items, half of which are paintings and graphic art from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection includes works by such famous artists as Hovhannes Aivazovsky, Alexander Benois, Albert Benois, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Alexander Ivanov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Boris Kustodiev, Vladimir Lebedev, Mikhail Nesterov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Zinaida Serebryakova and Ivan Shishkin. Period furniture and grandfather and mantelpiece clocks from Western Europe and Russia, dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occupy a prominent place in the Rzhevsky collection.
Many works are without analogies in national museums.
Among items of china are the produce of the Imperial Porcelain Factory, the private Gardner and Kuznetsov Factories, and the porcelain manufacturies of Sevres, Meissen and Berlin.