Exhibitions
Family Pastimes in the late XIX – early XX century
Kolomenskoe
OCTOBER 26, 2022 – JANUARY 31,2023
Ground floor of the Palace of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. Bldg 69, 39 Andropov Avenue, Kashirskaya metro station.
Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve invites you to the ‘Family Pastimes in the late XIX – early XX century’ exhibition.
On display you will see museum rarities as well as unique private collection items. Toys, board game sets, sports equipment and other items looking unusual for our time will help every visitor of the Palace of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich at Kolomenskoe to plunge into the late XIX century atmosphere.
The focus is by no accident made on family pastimes. Time spent together leaves common pleasant recollections and fosters true friendship between generations. And more than that, it grows into a tradition overtime.
Natalia Polonnikova, the project Curator
Travels, collecting things, a much-anticipated visit to a toy shop or a picnic – anything that made people happy a century ago you can see and partly feel at our exhibition. A toy railway, old dolls, children’s books and magazines, post stamps from a 1911 notebook ‘Rewards for Good Behavior’, pastry and candy wrappers from a 1920s collector’s album neighbor here on a ’Spider’ high wheeler bicycle (made in 1875-1880) from the Moscow Polytechnic Museum collection, a board game introducing various professions to children, table games for cheating time in a family circle on long winter nights, sitting under a cozy lamp shade. The display has not ignored the simple and well-known dominoes, lotto and puzzles, the once popular but now forgotten ‘Pick Up Sticks’, ‘Hurdles’ and ‘Battle of Sebastopol’ board games as well as accessories for family go-outs and holidays.
Furniture from the Gorki Leninskie Museum (a museum of Vladimir Lenin that used to be a noble family manor) and photos from the State Russian Library of Arts will create the epoch atmosphere around. The exhibition space is designed to make you feel inside an old house, on a walk in the garden, at a boat station or a skating rink. And if you wish you are welcome to take a photo by a boat or a makeshift panoramic wheel!
The project involves:
Kolomenskoe, Novgorod, Alexandrovskaya Sloboda and Gorki Leninskie Museum-Reserves, the Polytechnic Museum, the State Russian Library of Arts as well as Sergey and Tatiana Makeevs as private collectors.