The virtual exhibition “Collecting means being able to live in the past” is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the birth of Karl Simon Morgenstern (1770, Magdeburg – 1852, Dorpat) – a German philologist, humanist, literary critic, collector and numismatist; Professor of the Imperial Dorpat University, as well as an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (since 1826).

With the establishment of a new university in Dorpat, Karl Morgenstern was chosen to be the director of the Museum of Antiquities. In addition to forming the Museum’s collection, he possessed his own art collection, which, according to a will published in 1852, after his death was transferred to the Museum of the Imperial Dorpat University.

Collection of the Voronezh Regional Art Museum. I.N. Kramskoy forms part of the collection formerly owned by the Museum of the Imperial University of Dorpat (now the University of Tartu), including Dutch and Flemish canvases, paintings by old Italian and German masters, as well as German artists of the 19th century.

The exhibition aims not only to highlight the event and bring back the forgotten name of the collector of a past era, but also to illustrate, with the help of images and texts, the principle of collecting and the collector’s artistic taste, interests and passions.

The virtual exhibition presents two works from the collection of the University of Tartu Library, a photograph of Karl Morgenstern from the collection of the Estonian History Museum, as well as thirty works from the collection of the VOKhM named after I.N. Kramskoy, of which more than half are in the storage of the museum.