The National Museum of Art splits between two adjoining nineteenth-century mansions on Niyazi Street, holding the country's most substantial collection of paintings — Azerbaijani, Russian, and European, from the seventeenth century to the present. The Russian and Soviet rooms are particularly strong, with works by Aivazovsky, Repin, and a string of Caucasian landscape painters.
The building itself is part of the appeal: high ceilings, period mouldings, parquet floors. Plan two hours. Labels are mostly in Azerbaijani and Russian. The most rewarding rooms are those covering the early twentieth century, when Baku's oil money brought a generation of Russian and European masters to live and work in the city.