The Sumy Regional Art Museum was founded in March 1920 by the artist and the first director of the museum Nikanor Kharitonovich Onatsky and bears his name. The basis of the museum collection was made up of works from the nationalized city private collections, as well as the collection of the patron Oscar-Hermann Gansen, taken from Kyiv to Sumy, from paintings by Western European artists of the 17th century. The exposition of 15,000 exhibits is housed in eight halls of a two-story mansion built in 1890 for the State Bank.
Of greatest interest are the landscapes of Italian artists of the 17th-19th centuries, Dutch and Flemish painters, including students of Rubens, paintings by French landscape painters of the 19th century, works by A. Kuindzhi, I. Levitan, V. Serov, A. Savrasov, I. Shishkin, V. .Vasnetsov, I. Aivazovsky and others.