The museum now houses more than 10 thousand pieces of art, including paintings by some of the best-known Russian and Ukrainian artists of late 19th and early 20th century.

Potocki was also a wealthy landowner and one of his properties, the village of Severinovka named after him contained a quarry of light limestone, from which both the palace and most of Odesa's public buildings were built.

[3] The construction started in 1805 and was supervised by Francesco Boffo,[4] a noted Italian architect and the author of many palaces and public buildings in Odesa and the Crimea.

[5] The neoclassical building is a typical magnate residence of the epoch, with two floors, a large portico with a tympanum supported by six classical columns.

There is also a large collection of the Peredvizhniki movement, as well as paintings and other works of art by, among others, Ivan Kramskoi, Alexei Savrasov, Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Alexandre Benois, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Boris Kustodiev, Konstantin Somov.

The museum exhibits a large collection of works by the local school of painting – TURH (in russian ТЮРХ), the main representatives of which are: Kyriak Kostandi, Yevgeniy Bukovetskiy, Gerasim Golovkov, Tit Dvornikov, Petr Ganskiy, Gennady Ladyzhensky, Aleksandr Stilianudi, Pyotr Nilus and Nikolai Kuznetsov.

The collection represented by paintings of both early and late Soviet art, both forbidden and officially approved: Teofil Fraerman, Yuri Egorov, Valery Geghamyan, Martiros Sarian, Leonid Muchnyk, Alexander Atzmanchuk, Anatol Petrytsky, Valentin Khrushch, Amshey Nurenberg.

[12] Under the National Art Museum located several void cellars and galleries, in one of which an underground grotto was built under the central part of the building.