The middle of the XIX century passed for the Yaroslavl province under the sign of stucco "waste". Many teenagers from the villages went to the cities where their fathers and elder brothers already lived and worked. Here boys for the next five years entered the art of stucco training

All over Russia the stucco molding created by the hands of Yaroslavl masters was highly valued. It was decorated with the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Moscow Bolshoi Theater, the St. Petersburg New Hermitage and the Mariinsky Palace. It seemed that there was no such architect's plan that Yaroslavl masters could not have embodied in the clay. Often, especially talented peasants from peasants achieved such heights of skill that they themselves became architects and even sculptors.

It was exactly this kind of nugget that Alexander Mikhailovich Opekushin was. He was born in the village of Rybnitsa, Danilov district. His talent was multifaceted: marble and bronze busts, crucifixes and chaots, sculptural decoration of public buildings and private mansions, jewelry.

However, the real recognition came to the sculptor after the victory in the Moscow competition of the monument to A.S. Pushkin, installed later on Tverskoy Boulevard. In this competition many celebrities of that time took part, and Opekushin's victory caused a wave of indignation, envy, criticism. Member of the Academy of Arts from 1894, Opekushin from Nicholas II received the rank of State Councilor and a lifetime pension for the monument to Alexander III. The newspapers of that time called Alexander Mikhailovich "The Best Russian Sculptor."

However, in 1917, money earned by honest labor and stored in a bank was annulled, the house was confiscated, and the workshop was plundered. A poor and humiliated family is on the brink of starvation. Opekushin is forced to ask the Soviet authorities for mercy, which in 1919 allowed him to leave St. Petersburg and return to Rybnitsa, the home of the sculptor. In horrendous poverty and oblivion, knocked down by a serious illness, without medical assistance, after 4 years, Aleksandr Mikhailovich died.

In 1988 in the village of Rybnitsa, the A.M. Opekushina. This is a two-storey wooden building with a mezzanine, which was purchased by the sculptor's brother in 1913 to accommodate the stucco department of the local zemstvo school.

Over the years the house managed to serve as a comprehensive school, later there was a children's home, a military hospital and a collective farm artel. And only in the late 80-ies the house was transferred to the Yaroslavl Art Museum, which restored the building. And now, more than 20 years later, the house-museum of A.M. Opekushina presents the first exposition, called "Stucco Works of the Master."

Phone of A.M. Opekushina

+ 7 (48531) 6-26-11