Founded in 1914 to mark the centenary of poet Taras Shevchenko's birth, the Dnipro Art Museum holds around 8,500 works spanning the 16th to 21st centuries — paintings, drawings, sculptures, and decorative objects, with a particular emphasis on Russian and Ukrainian art. Landscape seascapes by Ivan Aivazovsky and genre paintings by Ilya Repin sit alongside works by local symbolist Mikhail Sapozhnikov, who was born in the city when it was still called Katerynoslav.
The museum occupies a four-story building a short walk from the Dnieper embankment. The collection survived the Second World War — though not without losses when the Wehrmacht occupied the city and took some pieces — and was fully restored after a fire in 1974. For a city of Dnipro's size and industrial identity, the quality and scope of the collection is genuinely surprising.