Lviv National Art Gallery

Leópolis / Ucrânia

Borys Voznytsky Lviv National Art Gallery , a leading art museum in Ukraine, has over 60,000 artworks in its collection, including works of Polish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Flemish, Spanish, Austrian and other European artists. The gallery is "successor" to a Polish institution, Lwowska Galeria Sztuki, founded in 1907 as the city's municipal museum. The Provenance of its current stock comes from a multiplicity of largely Polish sources, including the early purchase by the then city magistrature of the private collection of Jan Jakowicz. The collection was subsequently expanded through donations of parts of the Władysław Łoziński and Bolesław Orzechowicz collections. In 1940, after the city of Lviv/Lwów had been occupied by the Soviet Union, the Soviet government ordered the seizure of private property. As a result, works from the Lubomirski Museum, integrated with the Ossolineum since 1823, the Borowski Library and several other private collections, are currently in the possession of the gallery. All these works were, until the 1939 Invasion of Poland and subsequent state appropriation, the property of the Polish state, private Polish collectors, and of the Polish Roman Catholic church and, arguably, remain such. In early 2005 the Lubomirski collection of 14th - 18th century European art was transferred to its new premises - the renovated Palace of Count Potocki, a former governor of Austrian Galicia. A masterpiece by the 17th-century French artist, Georges de La Tour, is on permanent display.