National Art Museum of Azerbaijan

The museum's real strength is not any single old-master painting but the range fitted into two adjoining 19th century houses: Azerbaijani archaeology, painting, sculpture and decorative arts running alongside a genuine, if modest, survey of Western European, Russian and Oriental work under the same roof. Visitors who arrive expecting an encyclopedic, Hermitage-scale hang tend to be disappointed by the numbers on the wall. Visitors who treat it instead as a two-hour walk through Baku's own oil-boom architecture, furnished with a working regional survey collection and punctuated by real losses and real recoveries like the 1993 theft, tend to rate it well.

The National Art Museum of Azerbaijan occupies two adjoining 19th century buildings on Niyazi Street in central Baku, now connected into a single complex. The first, commonly called the De Boure palace after its original owner, was commissioned by Leo De Boure, an oil magnate and founder of the Caspian Partnership joint-stock company. De Boure petitioned the Baku City Council in February 1888 for approval of a two-storied stone palace and died before it was finished; the building was designed by the Russian engineer Nicholas von der Nonne and built between 1891 and 1895. De Boure's successors sold the unfinished palace to the Caspian Partnership in January 1891. After the 1917 revolution the building passed through a series of occupants: British military headquarters in 1919, the Soviet leadership under Nariman Narimanov from 1920 to 1925, and from 1933 the residence of the Soviet-era security official Mir Jafar Baghirov, who donated it to the National Art Museum of Azerbaijan in 1951.

The second building began as a school, the Mariinsky Women's Gymnasium, built in 1885. Sources disagree on exactly what it now holds: a Baku cultural-press profile puts the European art rooms inside the first building, while an encyclopedic source describes the second building as home to Eastern art collections, and Wikimedia Commons files photographs of both a French art hall and an Azerbaijani art hall under the second building's own category. This account does not resolve that conflict by picking a side.

The museum's own institutional history begins in 1936, when the Council of People's Commissars of Azerbaijan SSR ordered an Art department separated out of the Azerbaijan State Museum. Its first exhibition opened in 1937, initially inside the mansion of the oil magnate Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev. In 1943 the museum was renamed after Rustam Mustafayev, a stage and scenic designer. It moved into the De Boure palace, its present first building, in 1951, once Baghirov had donated the property.

The building was thoroughly reconstructed in 2006, and a new exhibition inside it opened in 2009. A second building was brought into use by the museum in 2013. In 2011 the museum was declared to meet first national and then European Museum Standard.

The collection is organized into two departments. Azerbaijani Art covers archaeology, painting, sculpture, graphics, and decorative and applied art. World Art covers antiquity and the Middle Ages, Western European painting of the 16th to 19th centuries, Russian art of the 18th to 20th centuries, and Oriental art from Turkey, Iran, China, Japan and elsewhere. Across the two buildings, seven rooms are given to European art and ten to Russian art, per an encyclopedic count; a Baku cultural-press profile places the seven European rooms specifically inside the first building, a location this account leaves as their claim rather than a confirmed fact, for the reason given above.

Sources differ on the size of the total holding: an encyclopedic count puts it at just over 15,000 items, of which more than 3,000 are on permanent display across 60 rooms and roughly 12,000 remain in storage; a museum-partner listing gives a slightly higher figure of over 17,000 items. Neither figure is dated on the page that gives it, so the discrepancy is left unresolved here rather than smoothed into a single number.

In July 1993, 304 items were stolen from the museum: 274 artworks and 30 medieval miniatures. A museum employee removed drawings from the Graphics Fund and moved them first to the director's house and then to the Ministry of Culture, from where they were smuggled out of the country. The most valuable single piece was a drawing by Albrecht Durer, Women's Bathhouse, valued at roughly 10 million US dollars; the haul also included works associated with Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin, Jacob van Ruisdael and Jean-Francois Millet.

The works surfaced years later in an attempt to ransom them to Germany. A 1997 meeting at the Grand Hyatt in New York, between a Kunsthalle Bremen curator and an undercover US Customs agent, led to an arrest; a further arrest followed the same year, and the last of the conspirators surrendered in 2006, ending in convictions and a suspended sentence for the man who surrendered. Twelve of the recovered works were returned to Germany in 2001, and the remainder went back to the museum in Baku.

The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 10:00 to 18:00, Wednesday from 12:00 to 21:00, and Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00, and is closed on Monday. Regular admission is 10 AZN for foreign citizens, 7 AZN for Azerbaijani citizens and 3 AZN for students; a guided tour costs 12 AZN, or 5 AZN for a student; photography without flash is a further 50 AZN per camera. Visitors describe a wardrobe near the entrance for coats and bags and a cafeteria on the ground floor.

Most visitors give the museum one to two hours, and several say that is more than the collection on display actually needs. The building itself, not any single painting, is what visitors describe wanting to linger in: the gilded ceilings, decorated fireplaces, mirrored music hall and staircase of the former De Boure palace.

Visitors consistently praise the building the museum occupies as much as any single object in it, and several note that the collection actually on display is smaller than the visit's two-hour reputation implies. Read against each other, the reviews describe a two-building stop that rewards attention to the architecture and the range of what is shown, from ancient pottery to Kandinsky, more than it rewards arriving with encyclopedic expectations.