The Odessa Museum of Western and Oriental Art possesses one of the finest collections of foreign art in the Ukraine. It was founded in 1923 on the basis of private collections assembled by the local Committee for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquity, and also of works received from the City Museum of Fine Arts and the cabinet of art history at Novorossiysky University. Later, it was augmented with new acquisitions from museums: the State Hermitage, the Kiev Museum of Western and Oriental Art, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The museum is housed in a palace built to the design of architect L. Otton in 1856-1858. Today it is an architectural monument incorporating elements of the Baroque, Empire and Rococo styles. The exhibition consists of three sections-Antique, West-European and Oriental art-and occupies twenty-three halls. The collection does not claim to provide an exhaustive representation of all the major periods of art history, but it contains a number of brilliant works by outstanding artists.