The leading masters of the second half of the XIX century – V.G. Perov, V.I. Surikov, A.I. Kuindzhi, A.K. Savrasov, I.I. Shishkin, V.D. Polenov, I.I. Levitan, V.M. Vasnetsov, I.M. Pryanishnikov, N.A. Yaroshenko and others – made up the core of the Society and became history of Russian art. The development of Russian art without them would have been different. The Peredvizhniki movement proved to be the central backbone phenomenon of the Russian culture of those times.

The choice of the project for opening new premises of the Tretyakov Gallery in Kadashevskaya embankment is not accidental. The creative rise of the Peredvizhniki in the 1870s–1890s happily coincided with the period of maturity of Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov's collection. Their works constituted the core of the Tretyakov Gallery founder’s collection. Presenting the new museum premises to the viewers the Gallery turns to its origins.

The exhibition will be the first large scale project devoted to Peredvizhniki in the last 50 years. Its target is to foreground the art of Russian realism and get away from stereotypes in its perception. The exhibition will include most famous pieces of Russian art as well as unfamiliar pictures by Peredvizhniki. Put together, they will reveal the range of problems that worried artists and society, will outline specific features of their creative method and outline the path covered by the art of the last third of the XIX – early XX centuries. Critical remarks of their contemporaries will describe the difficulties in perception and chronicles of the Society’s activities while archive documents will recreate the history in facts and show the multifaceted efforts of the Society as an independent educational association of artists.