Charity and patronage of arts are considered as early forms of social responsibility of Russian entrepreneurship. The author stresses the special role of the late XIX - early XX century merchants in the formation of endogenous institutions of the socially-oriented market economy. Merchants’ corporate traditions, aesthetic tastes and humanistic ideals in combination with market type economic rationality encouraged successful merchants to do social investments on a mass scale in order to create and maintain the reputation capital and state’s patronage of arts.