Bokshai Transcarpathian Art Museum

On 8 May 1919 the Central Ruthenian People's Council met in this building and voted to attach the region to Czechoslovakia. The paintings arrived sixty years later. Keep that order in mind: the old county hall on Zhupanatska Square governed this corner of the Carpathians for a century before anyone hung a canvas in it.

What hangs there now is the best of the region: icons out of the mountain parishes, one of the fullest collections of Hungarian painting in Ukraine, and the Transcarpathian school of painting shown in depth, in the city that produced it. The museum puts its holdings past 16,000 items, so any one visit is a slice.

What a zhupanat was, and what happened in this one

A zhupan headed a Hungarian county, and this was the seat of the Ung county administration, finished in 1809. Two storeys, U-shaped in plan, 3,289 square metres of floor space, long corridors with arched windows down the wings, a central risalit carrying a balcony. On the pediment are the Ung arms: a man holding three ears of wheat in one hand and three acorns in the other, for the grain of the lowlands and the oak forests above them.

Through the 19th century this was where Uzhhorod's public life happened — receptions, meetings, amateur theatricals, balls. A charity evening on 6 January 1852 raised the money for the town's first twelve street lamps; in February 1878 a society meeting here watched the first telephone demonstrated in Uzhhorod. After the 1919 vote the building became the governor's residence, and it stayed one until 1936. Its first occupant was Hryhorii Zhatkovych, a Pittsburgh lawyer born in the region, who came back as the first governor of Subcarpathian Rus and resigned in 1921 when Prague withheld the promised autonomy.

How the art got in

The collection is 136 years younger than the walls around it. In June 1945 the holdings of the former Land Picture Gallery were given a few rooms up at Uzhhorod Castle, and the display opened to visitors in November 1948. It grew for three decades on private donations, museum transfers and ministry purchases, in quarters that were never big enough. The move down into the zhupanat came in spring 1979; the name followed in 1990, for Yosyp Bokshai (1891–1975), whose bust stands on the façade. The house-museums of Andriy Kotska and Fedir Manailo, elsewhere in the city, became branches in 2009.

The Transcarpathian school, on its home ground

The best reason to come is the Transcarpathian school of painting, shown in depth in the city that invented it. In 1927 Bokshai and Adalbert Erdeli, both born in 1891, opened a private studio in Uzhhorod and called it the Public School of Drawing. It ran until 1945 and taught Andriy Kotska, Ernest Kontratovych, Zoltan Sholtes and Adalbert Boretskyi — the school's second generation.

The formula was a European training turned on local subjects: the ridges above the Uzh, high pastures, wooden churches, the faces of mountain villagers. Hung together, the differences sharpen — Erdeli the freer colourist, Bokshai the classicist, Kotska on lyrical portraits of village girls, Manailo pushing furthest into folk art. The sculptor Vasyl Svyda (1913–1989) cut crowded wedding and harvest scenes out of wood, peasant carving technique at professional scale; the museum holds more of his work than anywhere else.

Icons, Hungarians and a few Old Masters

The oldest things here are the 17th- and 18th-century icons, and the name to look for is Illia Brodlakovych-Vyshenskyi. He came from Sudova Vyshnia in Galicia, settled in Mukachevo and painted for the parishes around it; his Archangel Michael of 1666, from the church at Shelestovo, is among the museum's best-known pieces. Scholars have never settled whether that signature covers one hand or two — a father and a son.

The Hungarian holdings — 18th century to the early 20th, one of the fullest sets in Ukraine — run to Mihály Munkácsy, Imre Révész and Simon Hollósy. The European rooms turn up Francesco Albani, Lambert Lombard, Jacopo Palma and Claude Joseph Vernet; the Ukrainian and Russian ones, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Aivazovsky, Vasyl Tropinin and Ivan Shyshkin. One gift stands apart: in 1955 Ihor Hrabar — painter, restorer, art historian, born in Budapest to a Rusyn family from this borderland — handed the gallery 26 of his own canvases.

Visiting

The museum is at Zhupanatska Square 3, a few minutes uphill from the centre. The permanent display fills the right wing; the left wing and the central hall carry temporary shows that change about monthly, so a second visit is rarely a repeat. Mondays are closed. Allow an hour and a half for the icons and the Transcarpathian rooms at a decent pace, and come in the morning, when the halls are quiet. Stand back a moment before you go in: the square is small enough that the façade still does what it was built to do.