The exhibition shows more than 100 artworks that originated from the Armoury Chamber, the Grand Kremlin and Minor Nicholaevsky Palaces, the Chudov and Ascension Monasteries, and Kremlin cathedrals. Part of the items came from different sources after 1917.
As a separate museum complex, the fund of oil paintings was formed in 1994. Earlier, its objects used to be kept together with the Kremlin collection of icons.
Founded in 1806 upon the order of Emperor Alexander I, the museum Workshop and the Armoury Chamber consolidated ancient hereditаry coffins that had been being gathered in the generic storages of the Moscow Kremlin from the 14th century. They composed the state treasury of the supreme rulers of the country.
The fact that the Armoury Chamber belonged to the sphere of official state representation determined the origin, composition and orientation of the painted art pieces on display, which sources and methods of replenishment were radically different from those used by other Russian museums.
Already from the mid-16th century, the images of the Russian sovereigns were depicted on the frescoes of the Annunciation and Archangel cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin. The 17th-century inventories of the tsar treasury mention many parsunas (portraits) that used to decorate the chambers of the Terem Palace.
Prince N. B. Yusupov was the one who initiated the early formation of the portrait collection of the Armoury Chamber. His activity contributed to the drawing/composition of the museum collection of painted art. In 1814, he was appointed the Head of the Expedition of Kremlin Buildings, the Workshop and the Armoury Chamber that was in charge of all Kremlin property.
He left his mark on the history of the Armoury Chamber as an author and curator of its first exposition which was displayed in the museum, specially built for this purpose in 1806-1810 under the project of architect I.V. Egotov by the Troitskaya (Trinity) Tower of the Moscow Kremlin.
In 1815, when the interiors of the Armoury Chamber were renovated after the Napoleon occupation of the Moscow Kremlin, Yusupov ordered to expose in the halls the first dynastic series of painted portraits of the Romanov family members that he had earlier commissioned for this purpose.

Later the formation of the painted art collection of the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Armoury Chamber was proceeded by the Imperial Majesty's edicts, i.e. royal acts. Since the Armoury Chamber was included in the system of the Ministry of Imperial Court, founded in 1826, the main source for the replenishment of painted art in the 19th century was the Imperial Hermitage. The major part of the collection was occupied by the representative portraits of crowned heads,
In the Armoury Chamber, grand portraits of the Russian rulers were mainly presented by the artworks of the 18th- the first half of the 19th century. Most of them were created by the masters of rossica, such as the portrait of Peter I (1716) by German artist J. G. Tannauer; portraits of tsar's daughter Anna Petrovna (1725), as well as young tsar's son Peter Alexeevich with Tsarevna Natalia Alexeevna in the images of\as Apollo and Diana by French artist Louis Caravaque; portrait of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich by J. H. Wedekind (1728); portrait of Grand Prince Peter Fyodorovich by G. Ch. Grooth; portrait of Empress Catherine by Dutch artist V. Eriksen. The English school was presented by artworks of John Atkinson and
George Dawe. The minor group of portraits were accomplished by outstanding Russian artists: A. P. Antropov, F. S. Rokotov, V. L. Borovikovsky, as well as less-known artists G. D. Molchanov and I. Titov. Along with the pieces of West European and Russian artists, there were works of second-order and mostly anonymous artists – copies from famous originals, which had official status of approved iconographic standards. For example, among them was a 1844 copy of the portrait of Emperor Paul I, created in 1800 by V. L. Borovikovsky.

Starting from the second half of the 19th century, works of visual art were almost in every section of the Armoury Chamber. Being present in the Armoury, Trophies, Portraits, Carriages, Models, Silver and Harness halls of the Armoury Chamber, they composed an integral and organic part of the expositional ensemble. However, the meaning of pictorial artworks in the Armoury Chamber was not limited by the subsidiary role of a colourful decoration and illustrative addition to the treasury. Their role was much more important and significant, particularly relating to the portraits of the Russian rulers, who had actively formed the ideological programme of the museum. The latest was formulated by the head of the Expedition of Kremlin buildings P. S. Valuev. For Emperor Alexander I, he made a project of the Armoury Chamber with a clear and comprehensive definition as an 'Autocratic Museum', where the portraits of monarchs fulfilled the highest state function of representation and solemn glorification of power.
When the erection of a new museum building by the Borovitsky Gates was over in 1851, the Armoury Chamber became a part of the Grand Kremlin Palace. The large-scale building project started in the Moscow Kremlin in the mid-19th century, granted the Armoury Chamber an important role of a specific historical prologue to the Moscow imperial residence, which did not possess its own collection of tsars' and emperors' ceremonial portraits. The portrait gallery of the Armoury Chamber created a kind of political chronicle in faces and personalised the history of the Russian state.
The ideological aura surrounding the image of the sovereign from the days of yore was expressed in all forms of official everyday life of the Russian imperial court, part of which were ceremonial portraits of monarchs. They embodied a state political programme of absolutism and formed a special panegyric space in the Armoury Chamber, where the triumphal theme initially placed behind the display topic of the museum sounded most loudly. A peculiar way, personally authorized by Nicholas I, in which the portraits were framed with armature - opulent compositions, made of original banners, combat axes, swords, elements of armour and other signs of military glory – was one of the means the theme was realized.
As visible material results of monarchs' rule displayed in the halls of the museum, the trophies reflected the activity of sovereigns in the international scene, which aimed at the defence of the Fatherland and expansion of its borders. A significant part of such items was exposed in the Armoury Chamber in a designated Trophy hall, where they were placed under the feet of royalties depicted in portraits. Thus, the stretcher of Swedish King Karl XII and other trophies of the Poltava Battle were located under the portrait of Paul I. Among other objects, the keys of the towns Kilia, Bender, Akkerman, Enikopol, Perekop and Yass, conquered during the Russian-Turkish war, were laid under the portrait of Catherine the Great.
Under the reign of Nicholas I, imperial understanding of national ancientries and symbols of the state might, preserved in the Armoury Chamber, were expressed in the creation of a syntectic image of the Russian monarchy, embodied in the Crown Hall of the museum. It was a centre of the ideologic space, where 'the Display of the Russian Glory' reached its climax. A series of portraits of the Romanov and the Rurikids dynasties' family members serve as the semantic equivalent of this historical perspective, unfolding towards Russia's past. Unlike other portraits in the interiors of the Armoury Chamber, these were sited in a strict chronology of the rulings, during which the expansion of the country's territories took place. It was marked by the coat of arms on the railing. The portrait series of the Crown Hall is a genealogical corpus of titulary-heraldic content, which had remained actual over the whole time of monarchy existence and originated in the earliest Russian monument of such kind – the 1672 Titulary Book. In this book, the images of the sovereigns were indicated together with the spelling of their names, titles, and pictures of the state coat of arms and seals. Each image of the tsar or emperor of the series is followed by a figured cartouche with brief information on their rule, which fixed in the memory of descendants not only the historical deeds of the crowned heads but also the date of their death.

The most significant and organically intact period, when the paintings were on display in the Armoury Chamber, finishes with the creation of a unique expositional novelty of Nicholas' rule- the Crown Hall and the placement of historical canvases in the halls. Later additions were few and, at first blush, brought little changes to the general picture that had been formed during the rule of Alexander I and Nicholas I. Among them were the portraits of P. F. Karabanov, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and other non-extant pieces. Further on, the pictorial exposition of the Armoury Chamber had not changed much and existed as if conservated until the events of 1917 that led to the fall of the Russian Empire and the end of the autocracy.

After the October Revolution, the Kremlin museums were at the centre of stormy processes of the new Bolshiviks' policy establishment. The sequence of ministerial reattachments of the Armoury Chamber left a tragic imprint on the museum's destiny. From 1918 it was in the structures of the People's Commissariat for Education, from 1932 - under the supervision of the Committee on the Management of Scholars and Educational Institutions of the USSR Central Executive Committee, from 1938 – under the control of the Moscow Kremlin Сommandant's Headquarters. In an attempt to destroy "the elements of the autocraty apologia", the works of pictorial art were withdrawn from the collection of the Armoury Chamber which became catastrophic for the museum. The withdrawal began with the portraits of the monarchs - "the class approach" was applied to them in the first turn.
Upon numerous instructions from the authorities, the paintings with the best level of performance were transferred to the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The pieces of no artistic value, considered so by the officials, were sent to the State museum fund, encashed through the Antique and the All-Soviet Union on the Trade with Foreigner, lost in chaos and mess. The extant paintings of the main collection were spread over different venues on the territory of the Moscow Kremlin, ill-fitted to keep the pieces of visual art, which had significantly damaged the condition of the objects.
Parallel to these processes, a counter, spontaneous flow of oil paintings rushed into the museum. Until 1917, they were in the Grand Kremlin and the destroyed Minor Nicholas Palaces, in Kremlin cathedrals and the Chudov and Ascension monasteries, exploded in 1929 and 1932. Thus, not only secular paintings, created by such artists as A. Adam, I. K. Aivazovsky, F. A. Moller, N. E. Sverchkov, entered the fund of the oil painting. Icons and church images, seized during numerous inspections from the decoration of cathedrals, became also a part of the fund. At that time museum had also acquired portraits of the clergy, withdrawn from the chambers of the destroyed Kremlin monasteries, and pieces of art, commandeered from the palace property of non-Kremlin origin. The history of the collection replenishment in this period cannot be revealed in detail due to the loss of key documents that were not delivered to the museum archives. It is important to note that from the late 1920-s, thanks to the efforts of the museum staff, the collection of pictorial art was replenished at the expense of the State Museum Fund as some kind of compensation for the losses of previous years. The fund concentrated on its storages items of enormous artistic value. Several imperial portraits and landscapes with a view over the Kremlin, created in the workshop of F. Ya. Alexeev, came to the collection from it.
The Great Patriotic War interrupted the process of museum collection extension that had just begun. The history of the museum after the war was marked by its submission to the Ministry of Culture of the USSR in 1960 instead of the Kremlin's Commandant's Office.

The following paintings, the major part of which are landcapes, still life and domestic scenes of the West European work, came to the museum only in the early 1980s. The genre composition of this group proves a systemless approach when completing the museum fund of secular painting at that time.

Many positive changes featured a new chapter in the life of the collection that began with the organization of a separate fund of oil paintings. Among them was the systematic restoration of the oil art pieces that had brought back to museum life a significant part of secular paintings. Currently, many of them are actively used at comprehensive museum exhibitions.

The acquisition of portraits of F. G. Solntsev by E. A. Polyakov, the major part of his artistic legacy being kept in museum funds, and Emperor Alexander III by N. G. Shilder paved the way for the focused compilation of the fund with objects that would reflect the peculiarity of the Kremlin museums and fill the gaps in the personal list of imperial portraits that appeared during the troubled years.