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The European art collection in the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus is relatively small. It was boosted significantly in 1961 by donations from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, including paintings by Frederick de Moucheron and Jacob van Ruysdael. Other superb seventeenth-century Dutch paintings were acquired from private collections. The museum’s collection currently includes about 40 paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as paintings attributed to these artistic schools.  

The characteristic Dutch landscape is epitomized by Thomas Heeremans’s Winter and Summer, while Fishes by Jacob Gillig provides a striking example of a Dutch still life. Adoration of the Shepherds, painted by an unknown artist in the early seventeenth century, can be interpreted as a “group portrait”. Landscape with Travelers and Animals by Frederick de Moucheron can be classified among a large group of Dutch artists who produced somewhat abstract, idyllic, “Italianate” landscapes. The genre composition Going to the Hunt is attributed to the Haarlem artist Philips Wouwerman.  

The unique character of Flemish painting of the seventeenth century is suggested by the paintings of Jan van Kessel (Mercury and Argus), Daniel Seghers (Madonna and Child, St. John the Baptist and the Angels, surrounded by a Garland of Flowers), and Pieter Thijs (Venus in the Forge of Vulcan). Jan Frans van Bloemen’s Landscape with Figures and Landscape with Goats) are fine examples of the classicist idealized landscape.  

The museum’s collection contains over a dozen Netherlandish engravings by masters such as Thomas Wyck, Johannes Glauber, Jacob Jordaens, Albertus, and Theodoor van Thulden. The pearl of the collection is the sepia drawing Adoration of the Shepherds by an unknown seventeenth-century artist.  

Svetlana Prokopeva, Head of the Department of Foreign Art and Curator of European Painting, Sculpture, Prints and Drawings (September 2025)