Immerse yourself this winter in the cosmopolitan court of Catherine the Great, the eighteenth century’s most visionary female art collector. From 31 July 2015 the National Gallery of Victoria, in conjunction with the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and Art Exhibitions Australia (AEA), presents Masterpieces of the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great, bringing the legendary collection of the woman who embodied the Age of Enlightenment to Australia for the first time.

Told through a sweeping survey of masterpieces of art and design, this is the story of Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg (1729–1796), a German-born woman who embraced her adopted country of Russia, transforming its imperial capital Saint Petersburg into an international centre of Enlightenment.

A woman of the world

Catherine the Great (Catherine II) oversaw a period of cultural renaissance for Russia during the thirty-four years of her reign (1762–1796). The world of ideas in which she was deeply involved from an early age found tangible expression everywhere in the material world she later created around herself. The great complexes of imperial buildings that Catherine constructed reflected her informed interest in Classical and Chinese culture. Her collecting of paintings stemmed from a belief in the civilising power of art, and in its potential role in international diplomacy. Catherine’s diverse collections of decorative arts not only aimed to dazzle and please, with their richness and technical perfection, but also had the more practical purpose to raise standards of artistic production in Russia. It is an occasion for celebration that more than 500 exemplary works of art from her personal collection, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, porcelain, silver and precious gems, are being seen in Australia for the first time.

The immense breadth of Catherine’s interests and enthusiasms is showcased by this exhibition, as each room reveals another field of learning and yet another artistic tradition. Although she took no credit for being connoisseur, Catherine was no mere dabbler. She worked hard, read widely and corresponded about all manner of artistic subjects with the finest minds of her age. In portraits, Catherine self-consciously styled herself as Minerva, goddess of wisdom and protector of the arts. She employed an army of artists, architects and artisans, many of them lured from abroad, in projects she was genuinely interested in. Catherine was curious about the practical application of ideas, designing her own buildings and encouraging family members to take up the art of gem engraving.

Catherine and the Classical world

The peace that came after the pan-European Seven Years War turned Rome into a busy epicentre of archaeological excavations in the late 1760s. Untold marvels of ancient Roman architecture and sculpture were being unearthed to the frenzied delight of scholars and collectors alike. The fever for Antiquity struck Catherine – 3000 kilometres away – very hard. Unable to travel there in person because she was too busy, the Empress enlisted artists of all nationalities, from gem engravers to watercolourists, to capture these Classical wonders for herself and, ultimately, for her fellow Russians. Paradoxical as it may seem to modern thinking, to partake in the cult of Antiquity during the eighteenth century was to signal oneself as at the ‘cutting edge’ of culture. Artists were clever and quick at finding ways to combine the best of the past with the best of the present, producing enchanting novelties in the neoclassical taste which they turned to commercial advantage.

‘Cameo fever’

Catherine assembled a collection of thousands of tiny classical gems and casts by English gem carvers as a personal library of visual ideas. From the Sèvres Manufactory in France she ordered a vast and precious turquoise dessert service ‘after Antique models’, encrusted with ‘reproductions of cameos … in the best and newest style’ for her court ‘favourite’ and fellow gem-lover, Count Grigory Potemkin.

To fulfil her wishes, British gem makers and French porcelain workers employed the latest technical knowledge and Catherine rewarded them handsomely for their commitment to excellence. From her passion for cameos grew a wider love of collecting objects that led eventually to the foundation of the Hermitage.

A passionate collector

Aware of the political prestige that a great art collection could bring to a nation, Catherine collected masterpieces of modern and historical art. Sometimes she purchased directly from artists; for example, the Roman views bought from Charles-Louis Clérisseau. More often, however, she bought collections on the recommendation of her many learned and willing advisers across Europe who (in addition to her own energetic Russian agents) included the French philosophers Voltaire and Denis Diderot, the German writer Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, and her own personal consultant and artistic agent, the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet. In this way in 1779 Catherine acquired a Leonardo da Vinci, along with masterpieces by Anthony van Dyck, as part of the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister.

Catherine: A buyer of collections

Acquiring large groups of works was often expensive and not foolproof, but was a pragmatic approach which allowed Catherine to gather examples of every ‘important’ phase and national school of painting rapidly. Energetic in all things, she wished to waste no time in creating and projecting an image of herself and her country as engaged in the Enlightenment project.

The fruits of this great collecting endeavour, which Catherine so evidently enjoyed, are seen in the enfilade of rooms in this exhibition dedicated to Italian, Flemish, Dutch, French and British paintings and modern and Old Master drawings. In keeping with their method of acquisition, the pictures – beyond their visible beauty – have provenances that hint of the stories of earlier inspired collectors: august European names, such as Count Heinrich von Brühl, Count Cobenzl, Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers, Robert Walpole and others, are now interleaved into the tradition of the Hermitage and Catherine the Great.

Catherine not only looked to the West, but also turned to her counterpart the Qianlong Emperor in the East for lessons in harmonious government. She recognised a height of refinement in China’s decorative arts that fuelled her imagination and acquisitive instincts. Just as her French table settings were an inspiration to nascent Russian porcelain industries, here again Catherine’s extensive collection of silver filigree and enamel functioned to inspire the Russian imperial metal workshops and armouries. Originally Catherine’s Chinese collection adorned the Oranienbaum, Tsarskoe Selo and the Winter Place in specially designed, sympathetic interiors where one could breathe ‘the Ambrosia of Asia’. Deprived of opportunities to travel due to her busy schedule, Catherine travelled imaginatively through her art.

Friendships and the art of intimacy

Noted and loved for her sense of informality in private, Catherine nurtured rewarding friendships to a degree that is surely unusual among monarchs of any time. Although serfdom was not abolished in her age, Catherine abolished social hierarchy in her personal apartments. Some outstanding examples of family and child portraiture by Flemish, Dutch and French artists pay tribute to the warm, familial relations enjoyed by the growing bourgeoisie of Europe. In private, Catherine did her best to emulate the easy intimacy and affection radiating from these pictures, although she herself was raised with no such examples and did not rear her own children. She also understood that exposing her fellow countrymen to the world’s finest cultural offerings was an important means of elevating taste and knowledge, thus including Russia in the great and global Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century.

German-born Catherine the Great (Catherine II) came to power in 1762, aged thirty-three, and ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, until her death in 1796. She saw herself as a Philosopher Queen, a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, she modernised Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from Antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe. A fluent speaker of Russian, French and German, Catherine was largely self-educated, independent, idealistic and visionary.

While her reign was not always peaceful, Catherine sought to bring order, stability and prosperity to the vast Russian Empire. Her ideals of abolishing serfdom and ensuring the equality of all citizens under the law were ahead of her time, and strongly resisted by the nobility of the day; however, she achieved numerous other reforms, including the introduction of paper money and modernisation of Russia’s education system. French philosopher Denis Diderot, who visited St Petersburg in 1773, described an audience with Catherine as being ‘more like study than anything else: she is a stranger to no subject; there is no man in the Empire who knows her nation as well as she’.

Personal habits

Catherine rose at seven in the morning, drank strong black coffee and wrote until nine. From nine to twelve she would be de-briefed. She lunched at two and responded to mail or read. She entertained at the Hermitage in the evenings from six, and occasionally in her private rooms, but guests left by ten. Catherine ate sparingly but did not stint with offering her guests a lavish array of dishes.

‘Flying tables’

Catherine had a ‘flying’ mechanical dining table that rose up through the ceiling with guests’ noted selection of dishes. It would then be lowered with the chosen dishes, and raised again for the next course. This novelty was to enable guests to converse without fear of being overheard by servants.

Did you know?

When Voltaire died, his niece rushed to sell Catherine his library for a small fortune. The library contained 7,000 annotated works and was housed in the Winter Palace with a statue of Voltaire seated by Houdon.

Catherine was sent two busts of Voltaire, one wearing a wig and one without. She wrote: ‘I prefer the one without the wig; you know my aversion to wigs, especially busts wearing wigs; they always make me laugh.’
Catherine to Grimm: 1 October 1778

Voltaire called Catherine ‘the most brilliant star of the North.’

Diderot was the only philosopher to go to Russia.

The Baron Grimm jokingly referred to himself as an ‘Imperial second-hand goods dealer.’
Grimm to Catherine: 30 August 1782

Catherine sometimes baulked at her advisors’ enthusiasm to broker big sales and influence her collecting. ‘Why do you think I should buy everyone’s paintings?’
Catherine to Grimm: 16 May 1775

Between 1762 and 1796, the years of her reign, Catherine the Great oversaw a period of cultural renaissance in Russia. The world of ideas in which she was deeply involved from an early age found tangible expression in the material world the Empress later created around herself. The great complexes of imperial buildings Catherine constructed reflected her informed interest in both Classical and Chinese culture.

Catherine not only assembled a collection of Old Master paintings equal in scale and quality to leading European collections, but also paid considerable attention to the acquisition of contemporary painting. While the richness and technical perfection of her diverse collections of decorative arts aimed to dazzle and please, they also had the more practical purpose of raising standards of artistic production in Russia. The fact that more than 500 exemplary works of art from her personal collection, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, porcelain, silver and precious gems, are seen here for the first time in Australia is cause for celebration.

‘I can assure you that this collection contains an unexpected treasury of precious pictures’
Johann Bernoulli, 1778

The insatiable collector:
‘You’re surprised at my buying paintings: perhaps I’d be better off buying less for the time being, but you can never retrieve a lost opportunity.’ Catherine to Voltaire: 10 February 1772

The peace that followed the Europe-wide Seven Years War (1753–63) turned Rome into a busy epicentre of archaeological excavations in the late 1760s. Marvels of ancient Roman architecture and sculpture were being unearthed in the recently discovered Pompeii and Herculaneum, to the delight of scholars and collectors alike. The fever for Antiquity struck Catherine – 3000 kilometres away – with great force. Unable to travel to Italy herself, the Empress enlisted artists of all nationalities, from gem engravers to water-colourists, to capture these Classical wonders for herself and, ultimately, for her fellow Russians.

Strange as it may seem today, taking part in the cult of Antiquity during the eighteenth century was to be at the cutting edge of culture. Catherine’s interest in architecture had a great influence on Russian culture. Her taste developed rapidly and her collaboration with Giacomo Quarenghi, Charles Cameron and other outstanding architects led to the creation of buildings that marked the pinnacle of eighteenth-century Neoclassicism. During Catherine’s reign the grand complex of buildings today known collectively as the Hermitage were systematically constructed along the banks of the Neva River in St Petersburg.

‘Oh, Rome! Rome! The rest of the World cannot compete with you in the arts, in the ruins and in many other things.’
11 April 1779

‘This Quarenghi is producing delightful things; the whole town is stuffed with his buildings.’

On the architect Charles Cameron: ‘I have here an architect called Cameron, born a Jacobite, raised in Rome; he’s known by a work in the baths of the ancients. Always in a ferment, he’s a great admirer of Clérisseau.’
Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 23 June 1781

On her English garden at Tsarkoe Selo: ‘Tsarskoe Selo is an immense jumble of the prettiest outlooks anyone can see.’

On architecture books: ‘I’m mad about books on architecture; my entire room is filled with them and I can never get enough.’

‘As you know, the building frenzy is as powerful as ever with us, and hardly any earthquake can have knocked down as many buildings as we are putting up.’
Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 23 August 1779

‘Building is a devilish thing: it devours money, and the more you build, the more you want to build; it is a sickness, like drinking, or else it’s a sort of habit.’

On Clérisseau’s drawings of Antique ruins: ‘After several days of tirelessly looking at Clérisseau’s drawings in every spare hour, my head’s starting to spin.’
Catherine to Grimm: 7 November 1780

‘Bring on some Clérisseau, it’s a tasty treat.’
Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 14 May 1780

Did you know?

Catherine thought of St Petersburg as the ‘Third Rome’ (after Constantinople).

Catherine had a horror of poorly constructed buildings: she almost suffocated in a fire in an old wooden building, and she was once in a new palace that collapsed because of shoddy foundations.

Catherine’s ‘Hanging Garden’ next to the Winter Palace was a garden built on the roof of a palace wing. A rolled lead roof was installed over its vaulted ceiling and the rooftop was loaded with soils and planted with trees, shrubs and flowers. Question: Did it ever leak?

Catherine had several royal residences: her favourite was Tsarkoe Selo, meaning ‘Tsar’s Village’, not far from St Petersburg. It was her refuge from the summer heat. She commissioned a neoclassical gallery and had an informal, ‘English-style’ garden laid out, in which she liked to wander.

One of Catherine’s greenhouses at Tsarskoe Selo was enlivened by birds, squirrels and even monkeys.

Catherine the Great made her first acquisition of engraved gems in 1763, in the second year of her reign, and her interest in these objects soon developed into what she called ‘an imperial affair’. The Empress purchased as many important collections of engraved gems she could find. By 1790 she had acquired some 10,000 engraved gems, or cameos, dating from the fourth century BC to contemporary pieces, such as the portrait displayed here of her as Minerva the Roman goddess of art and wisdom, engraved by her courtier and daughter-in-law Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna.

‘My little collection of engraved stones is such that yesterday four men had difficulty in carrying it in two baskets filled with drawers containing roughly half the collection; so that you should have no doubts, you should know that these baskets were those used here in the winter to carry wood to the rooms.’
Catherine to the Baron Grimm: April 1785

Gems that could not be acquired instead came to St Petersburg as paste and glass copies, most notably the collection made in the London workshop of James Tassie. In this manner Catherine acquired another 34,000 casts and pastes, which were meticulously catalogued and stored in specially designed cabinets filled with sliding drawers. In her youth Catherine had studied ancient Greek and Roman history and philosophy, and the gems’ numerous depictions of Classical history and mythology reignited this passion. In 1785 she wrote: ‘God knows how much pleasure there is in handling all this every day; they contain an endless source of all sorts of knowledge’.

Did you know?

Foreign artists grouped together. Catherine’s English artists tended to live around the English Embankment. Her German artists lived across the river in the German quarter of Vasilevsky Island. An estimated hundred Scottish craftsmen lived in Sophia, a nearby suburb.

Catherine monopolised the production of the Brown brothers, Britain’s leading gem engravers.

Catherine referred to David Roentgen, the German master cabinet-maker and co-creator of the tall gem cabinet in this exhibition as ‘The best cabinet-maker and mechanic of the century’.

David Roentgen came to St Petersburg and made over 130 pieces of furniture in the restrained neoclassical style that Catherine favoured.

German cabinet-makers were perhaps the best in Europe. Many of the most famous Paris cabinet-makers were in fact German.

The Sèvres Cameo Service relates to Catherine’s great passion for collecting engraved gemstones. Consisting of 797 individual pieces designed to serve dinner, dessert and coffee to sixty people, the Cameo Service was commissioned from the celebrated Sèvres porcelain manufactory outside Paris as a present for Catherine’s court ‘favourite’, Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Empress’s monogram, ‘E II’ (the Russian version of her name being Ekaterina), woven from garlands of flowers and surmounted by a crown, adorned almost every object in the service.

Production of the service was both time consuming and labour-intensive. The exquisite blue element alone – consisting of separate layers of copper enamel that gradually seeped into the porcelain and set the pure colour – required five firings. In addition to the hundreds of porcelain objects decorated with painted and sculpted cameos and related silverware, the service also included grand central table decorations fashioned from biscuit, or unglazed cream-coloured porcelain, by the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot. These decorations illustrated tales from Greek mythology, and were presided over by a grand biscuit statue of Catherine the Great as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts.

Did you know?

Catherine liked to commission porcelain services as gifts for her favourite advisers. She thought carefully about what type of decorations would most please them. One service, designed for an advisor Count Bezborodko, was decorated with Italian views.

Potemkin gave Catherine an Angora cat in thanks for his Cameo service. Catherine loved the cat and called it ‘the owner of the velvety paws’, and ‘the cat of all cats’.

The technical difficulties of producing perfectly round plates (rather than scallop-edged ones) meant that barely one out of every three moulded plates were to an acceptable standard and faulty results had to be destroyed.

The Cameo Service contains more than 2000 different images, and cost 328,188 livres (approximately $3 million in today’s terms). Paying for it was spread out over twenty-four years.

Louis XVI allowed his personal collection of cameos to be used as models for the service as a personal compliment to Catherine.

When Catherine the Great began collecting European art, opportunities to acquire fine Italian Old Master paintings were already severely limited. Demand from wealthy collectors was high and the marketplace was saturated with misattributed works, some of which made their way to the Hermitage.

Despite this, Catherine achieved great success collecting sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, particularly from Venice, including great paintings by Titian, Paris Bordone and the enigmatic Lorenzo Lotto. These are complemented by fine examples of Roman and Florentine paintings, such as the famous Female nude (Donna nuda), early 16th century, by an artist very close to Leonardo da Vinci. This select group of paintings beautifully illustrate developments in figurative art, portraiture and religious art in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

In the early years of her reign, Catherine the Great acquired en masse several large collections of drawings representing all the main European schools. This set the foundations for the current Hermitage Museum’s outstanding Cabinet of Drawings. In terms of quality, Catherine’s acquisitions of Italian drawings were of the highest standard, with hundreds of masterworks by the finest Italian artists. The majority of the Italian drawings date from the mid sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries and include many rare and precious works.

Did you know?

Dealers in Italy were an untrustworthy lot and Catherine sometimes learned the hard way. After a transaction with Mr Thomas Jenkins of Rome, she wrote: ‘I beg … categorically not to buy anything else from Mr Jenkins, it is scandalous to pass off awful things like these as the work of such and such a painter’.
Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 27 September 1781

Catherine acquired her art education and passion for collecting from reading descriptions in dealers’ catalogues: ‘by reading the catalogues of paintings I’ve bought, I’ve learned to describe what I see’. Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 29 November 1775

In the seventeenth century, Flanders comprised the Catholic-dominated Southern Netherlands or ‘Spanish’ Austrian Netherlands, an area larger than modern Belgium. Thanks in large part to the talents of artist Peter Paul Rubens, the Flanders or ‘Flemish’ school in this era became very prestigious. While chiefly a painter, Rubens had far-reaching stylistic influence on many visual art forms, from prints to silverware and architecture. Every leading artist of seventeenth-century Flanders studied in, passed through or was connected with Rubens’s studio.

A diplomat and court insider, Rubens operated on an international stage. His art was correspondingly monumental; characterised by large forms modelled with loose brushstrokes in glowing, brilliant colours. Rubens’s pupil Anthony van Dyck and collaborator Cornelis de Vos led the way in bringing new naturalism to portraiture. While they catered to different markets (van Dyck to the nobility and de Vos to a rich merchant class) their mutual influence is apparent.

Flanders was a nation built on trade, and Flemish artists travelled widely, especially to Italy. From Italy they brought back new pictorial trends, such as the theatrical naturalism of Caravaggio. Flemish artists excelled in naturalistic effects, which they applied even to traditionally humble subjects, such as still lifes and animal pictures, seen to brilliant effect in the art of Frans Snyders and David Teniers II.

On the arrival of Northern art from the Baudouin collection containing Rembrandts, Rubens and Van Dycks: ‘We are prodigiously delighted!’

Catherine to Diderot: ‘My paintings are beautiful … when would you like to come and see them?’

Did you know?

Some pictures Catherine bought turned out to be more important than she realised. Diego Velàzquez’s Luncheon came into her collection as a ‘Flemish scene’ by an unknown artist. Its true identity was only recognised in 1895 by the German scholar W. von Bode. A true discovery!

The Hermitage holds the finest collection of Dutch art outside the Netherlands. While Peter the Great (1672–1725) had a passion for Dutch art and acquired some notable masterpieces, Catherine the Great established the depth and breadth of this extraordinary collection, beginning in 1764 with her first acquisitions. In that year Catherine purchased 317 paintings that had been assembled for Frederick II of Prussia by the German merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Among this substantial group were more than 100 Dutch paintings by the most notable masters.

In 1769 Catherine purchased the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, which included spectacular landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Isaack Jansz. van Ostade and Aert van der Neer, as well as four Rembrandt portraits, including the wonderful Portrait of a scholar, 1631. For the rest of her life Catherine continued to add outstanding Dutch works to her rich collection.

Although the paintings and drawings from the Dutch school included here are only a fragment of the extensive and diverse collection of Dutch works assembled by Catherine the Great, they reveal her artistic preferences and taste.

The Russian aristocracy spoke French and modelled their manners and styles on those of the French Court. Catherine the Great followed the great intellectual strides of the French philosophes with passionate interest. She also embraced the arts, luring French artists, architects and craftsmen to St Petersburg and rewarding them more handsomely than their local counterparts.

Catherine relied on agents and advisers in France to identify and acquire works of art on her behalf. In this way she secured the collection of Paris banker Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers, and other important bodies of work in France. Her holdings of French art came to encompass works by Renaissance masters as well as seventeenth-century landscapes and history paintings by Sébastien Bourdon, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.

Catherine also acquired examples of work of her own century, by Rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau. The playful, erotic and at times wistful art of Watteau’s generation gave rise to the intimate and worldly art of François Boucher, whose pictures Catherine also purchased. The Empress also collected modern masterpieces created in reaction to French courtly and decadent styles. Her paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin are premier examples of a new, moralising simplicity in art of the time.

Grimm on Catherine’s intention to buy a famous French art collection: ‘Art lovers yell, artists yell, the rich all yell … The Empress plans to acquire the Crozat collection.’

Did you know?

As a result of Catherine’s enthusiasm for contemporary art, Louvre curator Jean-Pierre Cuzin wrote in 1896: ‘The imperial Russian collections at the end of the eighteenth century were thus far richer in “modern” French paintings than those of the French kings’.

Some of the French artists that Catherine lured to Russia were regarded by the French as traitors. France was very jealous of the special techniques developed by the luxury craftsmen in its prestigious royal factories. Catherine’s poaching of artistic talent was sometimes seen as a form of industrial espionage.

The French Consul-General was alarmed when he saw the high calibre of Frenchmen Catherine had working for her: ‘Russia spares no expense to seduce and attract workers of all kinds’. Jean Baptiste Rossignol to Duc de Choiseul: 12 April 1768

Catherine loved French culture, but found French artists and designers demanding. She also doubted their capacity to work well with local craftsmen who only spoke Russian. She ended up relying on an Italian, Quarenghi, and an Anglo-Scotsman, Charles Cameron, for her building designs.

Catherine could not always get what she wanted when she wanted it. She pined after the paintings of neoclassical German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, writing: ‘Will the day ever come when I can say I’ve seen works by Mengs?’
Catherine to Grimm: 19 November 1778

For Catherine, collecting art was part of a wider economic and diplomatic program aimed at improving Russia’s profile abroad and at encouraging innovative thinking, economic activity and industry at home. At a meeting with the Senate in Moscow in December 1762, Catherine first suggested that consuls be stationed in Spain, Holland and England not only to promote maritime trade but also to source luxury goods and art objects as examples for Russian artists and manufacturers.

Through her consuls and agents such items began to flow into St Petersburg, steadily elevating that city (which was under construction) into a vibrant centre of European culture. While her cultural sympathies were French, Catherine was also very curious about Britain, the economic success story of the age. She informed herself about its trade, commerce, manufactures, philosophy, and political system, and bought examples of modern British neoclassical masters, such as Joseph Wright of Derby and Angelica Kauffman. Examples of Spanish, Italian and German art were often not sourced in their own countries of origin, but acquired as a part of larger collections.

‘Not including the pictures and Raphael’s Loggia, [my Hermitage] contains 38,000 books, four rooms filled with books, prints, 10,000 engraved gems, about 10,000 drawings, and a natural history section housed in two large rooms … to go to and from my [museum] takes three thousand paces; there I walk among a mass of things I like and enjoy, and these winter strolls are what keeps me healthy and active.’
Catherine to Grimm: 18 September 1790

Did you know?

Catherine was an Anglophile. She loved Wedgwood’s ceramics and above all English gardens. ‘I’m mad about English gardens, curved lines, gentle slopes, lake-shaped ponds … in a word, Anglomania dominates my plant-omania’. Catherine to Voltaire: 11 July 1772

There were many English shops in St Petersburg in the eighteenth century which sold English mahogany furniture, popular in the palaces and mansions of the city’s elite. English goods were also advertised in The Saint Petersburg Gazette.

At one point, Catherine’s Scottish architect Charles Cameron sent for about 100 Scottish craftsmen to come to Saint Petersburg. They settled in Sophia, a nearby suburb.

Catherine sometimes got it wrong:
‘I’ve received for the Oranienbaum two awful bas-reliefs that cannot be put anywhere’. Catherine to Falconet: 14 June 1768

Catherine once lost a shipment of paintings purchased from the Amsterdam collection of Gerritt Braamcamp when the ship was wrecked of the coast of Finland in 1771. Lost in the shipment was a celebrated triptych by the Dutch Golden Age painter, Gerrit Dou, for which Catherine had paid the record price of more than fourteen thousand guilders.

In 1779 Catherine the Great acquired 198 paintings from a celebrated collection formed by Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, Britain’s first prime minister. They were bought from the family estate, Houghton Hall, and sold by Walpole’s grandson, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford, who approached the Russian ambassador to Britain directly about the sale. At more than £40,000, the price was high, and the transaction was concluded in only two months. Attempts were made to keep this famous collection in Britain, to no avail.

The Walpole collection was outstanding in quality, and significantly enhanced the Hermitage’s range of Flemish and Italian works. The Russian ambassador to Great Britain, Alexey Musin-Pushkin, who organised the valuable purchase, wrote to Catherine the Great:

The greater part of the nobility here are displaying general dissatisfaction and regret that these paintings are being allowed out of this country, and are setting in train various projects to keep them here … No little assistance comes from Lord Orford’s zealous desire to unite [the collection for] the gallery of Your Imperial Majesty, rather than to sell it to parliament itself or, least of all, to divide it through sale to different individuals.

‘The Walpole paintings are no longer to be had for the simple reason that your humble servant has already got her claws on them and will no more let them go of them than a cat would a mouse.’Catherine to the Baron Grimm: 16 April 1779

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment fascination with the East, particularly China, is reflected by Catherine the Great’s architectural and landscaping works completed in St Petersburg and at her summer and winter palaces, as well as by her collecting of Oriental curiosities and philosophical texts. Russian interest in China can be traced to the reign of the Romanov tsars in the seventeenth century, when several missions brought back Chinese treasures and goods to the Russian Court. Importantly, in 1689 the first treaty between Russia and China was signed at Nerchinsk, outlining the border between the countries and rules about caravan trade.

Like many educated people of her time, Catherine was fascinated by the concept of the enlightened ruler thought to be found in China, such as the Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736–95). One of her regular and most influential correspondents was French philosopher Voltaire, who praised the Celestial Kingdom, its monarchs and men of wisdom; only in China, he thought, was a man’s life, honour and property truly protected by law. Such a clear link between Catherine’s desire for justice and order in Russia and general perceptions of good Chinese government, combined with the Enlightenment fashion for curiosities of all kinds, led to great Russian interest in China in the 1770s.

Catherine on her Oriental rooms in the Winter Palace: ‘This museum forms a haven which one reaches via China, China via Turkey, Turkey via Persia’.

Did you know?

In Russia, ‘English style’ was often synonymous with Chinoiserie. Catherine’s ‘Chinese’ pavilions designed for her park at Tsarskoe Selo were in fact inspired by versions that Catherine had heard about in Kew gardens and other English parks – not China!

Catherine, like the Qianlong Emperor, had a passion for English clocks and watches. She assembled a huge collection of them, which she housed together with her precious gems.

Chinese gold was a great rarity compared with silver. This exhibition features a number of gold pieces of jewellery.

Catherine’s collection of Chinese metalwork were often moved around and some sets today include components from other sets.

A number of items in Catherine’s Chinese collection are exhibited here for the first time.

Catherine had two silver filigree toilette sets (one Chinese and one Indian). Only one other complete Chinese toilette set is known to exist in the world (in Burghley House, UK).

Precious Chinese decorations and hairpins first came to Russia as diplomatic gifts.