Palace of Pavel Stroganov

A large four-storey house (No. 11/2) at the corner of Sergievskaya, the current Chaikovskogo street, and Mokhovaya has a long history. Its beginning dates back to the end of the 1730s, when the court servant of the crown princess Elizabeth Petrovna Andrei Kashtarev bought this plot from the captain-lieutenant of the Preobrazhensky regiment Fyodor Firsov. Years passed, its owners changed. In 1857, Count Pavel Sergeevich Stroganov, an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a lawyer and a passionate collector, inherited the plot. By his order, the architect Ippolit Monighetti erected a two-story mansion with 10 windows, which became a kind of branch of the Museum of Western European Art in Russia. Now it houses the College of Marine Instrument Engineering and the fairly rebuilt Stroganov house, perhaps, would have long been forgotten, if not for one "but". In 1863 - 1865. Stroganov commissioned the artist Jules Meiblum to capture the most significant rooms of the mansion in a series of watercolors now kept in the Hermitage collection, thanks to which you and I can now see the dwelling of a Russian aristocrat of the second half of the 19th century. in all its splendid glory.