Location
Beyond the place depicted by Vasily Polenov there is a neo-classical mansion aka Spaso House. The name was taken from Spasopeskovskaya Square, in the Arbat District (see the previous post "Where the legend was born"). Not far from the American Embassy grounds, Spaso House sits just off the garden ring road that passed the old American Embassy and is a few short block from Arbat. The great hall is 82 feet long with a domed ceiling that holds the largest Russian crystal house chandelier in Moscow.
It was one of the mansions confiscated by the communists during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Spaso House had been completed only three years earlier in 1914 by wealthy banker, munitions dealer and textile merchant Nikolay Aleksandrovich Vtorov. He commissioned the architects Vladimir Adamovich and Vladimir Mayat, two prominent advocates of the neoclassical style, to build the new mansion.
