The Room with Sviatoslav Richter Pastel Drawings

Sviatoslav Richters artistic interests and pastimes were extremely diverse, like the gifts with which God had endowed him. “As well as the Divine gift of music” he not only loved and knew the fine arts well, but was himself an artist.

His pastel works are now in the Museum of Private Collections of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. There are regular displays of them in the Memorial Apartment.

Robert Falk detected “a remarkable sense of light” in Richter's pastels. His friend, the artist Anna Ivanovna Troyanovskaya used to say:

“He drew exclusively from impressions and from memory: he seemed to have fully formed ideas about space, distance and perspective, and his feel­ing for tone and colour was quite remarkable. But the most surprising thing about him was his instinct for movement. This is probably what one might expect from a musician. His memory was quite phenomenal. And his imagination too. Obviously without a vivid imagination he could not have understood the mind of the composer whose music he was playing”.

There were no pastel drawings or photographs on the walls of the apartment in Richters lifetime. Today they are kept in a special room, where they are brought out for displays illustrating the musi­cian's life.