The collection is based on the collection of the itinerant artist N.A.Yaroshenko donated to his native city, which arrived in Poltava in 1917. It included 100 paintings and 23 working albums of the artist himself, as well as a significant number of works by friends and colleagues from the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, in particular, I. Shishkin, V. Polenov, V. Makovsky, I. Repin, V. Maksimov, etc. The Poltava Art Museum was opened on April 27, 1919 and originally had the status of an art gallery. Its founder, later a well-known Ukrainian archaeologist and museum expert Mikhail Yakovlevich Rudynsky, called it the "Museum of Arts". The museum also houses interesting miniatures of the 17th-19th centuries by the French master Bernard (portraits of Napoleon, Josephine, Marie-Louise), miniaturists from Germany and Austria G. Fuger, K. F. Kepke, A. Antreiter. The decorative and applied arts of China, Japan, Iran, Turkey, France and Germany are represented by collections of products made of porcelain, stone, metal, and fabrics. The most significant are the collections of porcelain from the Saxon, Sevres, and Vienna factories of the 18th-19th centuries.