Mykola Pymonenko Museum

About the Museum

The Mykola Pymonenko Museum in the village of Maliutianka (a branch of the Communal Institution "Boyarka Local History Museum" of the Boyarka City Council) is an art and memorial museum that opened in 1997 to honor the 135th anniversary of the artist's birth. The museum was built on the site of the workshop of the famous Ukrainian artist Mykola Kornyliovych Pymonenko.

Mykola Pymonenko first visited Maliutianka as an 11-year-old boy, helping his father, Kyiv icon-painter and woodcarver Kornylii Pymonenko, paint the village chapel. He later returned there in 1884 to restore his health after studying for two years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

In the same house where he had stayed as a child and young man, Pymonenko set up his workshop. From 1888 to 1912, he and his family came to Maliutianka every summer.

In Maliutianka, Pymonenko created more than 120 paintings, including "Christmas Fortune-Telling" (1888), "Reaper" (1889), "Harvest in Ukraine" (1896), "Before the Storm" (1906), "A Wedding in the Kyiv Governorate" (1906), "Idyll" (1908), and "Geese, Go Home!" (1911).

In 1981, Pymonenko's workshop was destroyed by a fire, and the villagers took the initiative to open a museum in its place.

The key drivers of this project were well-known Ukrainian artists Mykola Malyshko (a sculptor and winner of the Shevchenko Prize) and Nina Denysova (an artist and member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine). They worked with many other residents of Maliutianka on the construction of the museum.

The museum's design was developed by the architect Viktor Vecherskyi (a candidate of architecture and winner of the State Prize of Ukraine in the field of architecture).

Museum Exposition

The museum's exposition features and preserves documents, copies of paintings, household items related to Pymonenko and his era, ethnographic materials, and printed papers from the artist's family archive, which were donated by his great-grandson Mykhailo Hruzov.