At left, Gordon Lankton, owner of the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Mass., examines an icon. Above, an image of St. Nicholas.

The New York Times / Wendy Maeda

CLINTON, Mass. — A small brick building adjoining a driver’s education school and insurance agency isn’t the first place a person would look for the world’s largest collection of Russian icons outside of Russia. But that’s where the Museum of Russian Icons is, in this mill town on the Nashua River. It’s an hour west of Boston and a world away from St. Petersburg.

“Everybody I talked to about this said, ‘You’re crazy not to do it in the big city,’ ” Gordon Lankton, the museum’s founder, said in a recent interview at the museum. Lankton, 77, spoke with enthusiasm about icons, oblivious to the sound of hammers and crumbling plaster coming from behind a back wall.

The museum, which opened two years ago, is in the process of doubling its size of 5,000 square feet. Some 5,000 visitors came last year. This year it reached that figure by June.

Attendance is expected to go even higher starting Oct. 16, when the museum hosts its first traveling exhibition. “Two Museums/One Culture” features 16 master icons from the world’s premiere institution of Russian art, Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, as well as icons from the museum’s collection.

“It’s rare for them to loan,” said Natalia Batova, cultural attachi at the Russian Federation Embassy in Washington, D.C., in a telephone interview.” This show is quite an event.”

How did Clinton become so, well, iconic? The town has no appreciable Russian population or other major cultural institutions. What it has is Lankton.

“The town of Clinton was very good to me,” Lankton said. “I decided as long as I made my money in Clinton I should pay back some of it in Clinton.”

The museum has more than 350 icons, dating from the 15th century to the present. Painted in egg tempera on wood or cloth mounted on wood, these icons are religious works that portray Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or saints. They range in size from miniatures, 1 by 2 inches, to much larger works, 36 by 48 inches. Gold leaf is often employed for halos and backgrounds.

Estimates of the collection’s worth range from $5 million to $10 million.” But it’s not an expensive hobby, like Western European art,” Lankton said

“That the Tretyakov loans its icons to Gordon Lankton’s museum is very significant,” said Maria Zavialova in a telephone interview last week. Zavialova is curator at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.

“It means that they trust him. Icons are very fragile. They don’t travel well. So museums that have old, valuable icons don’t like to let them out of their storage facilities. But Lankton’s museum is state of the art. It has everything. They trust what he has to offer.”

The museum is across the street and up a hill from the world headquarters of Nypro. Lankton, 77, grew the plastics-molding firm from 20 employees and revenues of $600,000 a year in 1962, when the Illinois native purchased half of it, to 15,000 employees and revenues of $1.2 billion today.

Lankton, who bought out his partner 40 years ago, stepped down as Nypro’s president in 2002. Although the museum takes up most of his time, he has stayed on at the company as chairman of the board.

It’s appropriate that Lankton hasn’t entirely given up Nypro for the museum, since it’s because of the company that the museum exists.

Over the years, Lankton had dabbled in collecting: some 500 wood carvings, the occasional primitive painting purchased on business trips to Bali or India (Nypro has facilities in 16 countries). But he was by no means an active art collector.

That changed 18 years ago at a Moscow flea market.

Lankton had gone to Russia to investigate opportunities for Nypro after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” I picked up this thing and asked what it was,” he recalled of his first encounter with an icon.

“I bought it for $20, took it home, and asked some questions,” Lankton said. “The next trip I bought one for $50. Next trip I bought one for $100. Next trip for $500. Now it’s 16 years later and I have a museum.”

Asked to explain icons’ appeal for him, Lankton mentioned extra-artistic qualities: the window they afford on Russian culture and the fascination of the stories of the saints and martyrs portrayed in them.

“I had never read the Bible when I first looked at icons,” Lankton said. “Now I read it like crazy because most of the stories in the pictures are Bible stories.”

At first, Lankton hung the icons in his home. When his collection hit triple figures, early in this decade, his wife forbade further purchases. “So I knew I had to do something if I was going to keep collecting,” he explained. “By then I was an addict.”

He approached New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum about donating his icons. Told that only a fraction of each museum’s holdings were ever displayed, which meant his icons would be consigned to storage, he began to consider the idea of displaying them himself.

The curator of the Museum of Russian Icons, Kent dur Russell, was formerly director of the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester. “In the early days of working on this project I wasn’t as optimistic as Gordon was about finding an audience for this subject matter in Clinton,” he said with a laugh in a recent interview at the museum.

The hope is that “Two Museums/One Culture” will be “a coming of age” for the museum, Russell said, “and bring national attention to this institution.”

Lankton spoke of the exhibition in more personal terms. “The culmination of a career is going to happen in the next month. So it’s very exciting.”

Culmination is not the same as conclusion.

Asked whether he continued to collect, Lankton did a double take. “Do I still collect? Oh, yeah. Till the money runs out.”