Catherine the Great

  There may have been an element of spite in her purchase of a collection originally destined for Frederick. When Elizabeth was on the throne, Russia had been at war with Prussia; then Peter III had succeeded his aunt, had switched sides, and had become Frederick’s ally. Now, pulling Frederick’s paintings out from under him would partially balance the ledger. Not all of her new paintings were masterpieces, but they included three Rembrandts, a Franz Hals, and a Rubens.

  When the paintings arrived in St. Petersburg, Catherine was so pleased that she sent word to her ambassadors and agents in Europe to be alert for other collections that might come up for sale. Fortunately, the Russian ambassador in Paris was Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, a polished Enlightenment figure, a friend of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s, and a habitué of the intellectual and artistic salon of Madame Geoffrin. Golitsyn arranged Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library in 1765 and continued to buy paintings for Catherine as long as he remained in Paris. When he left France to become Russian ambassador in The Hague, Diderot agreed to become Catherine’s scout, selecting and buying paintings for her. The most prestigious and best-informed art critic in the world now was acting for the richest and most powerful woman in the world.

  A few years later, in 1769, Catherine scored a coup when the famous Dresden collection of the late Count Heinrich von Brühl, minister of foreign affairs to Augustus II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, came on the market. She paid 180,000 rubles to acquire the collection, which included four more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and five works by Rubens. The paintings were delivered by sea, up the Baltic and into the Neva River, where the ships tied up at the Winter Palace quay only fifty feet from the palace doors. For the next quarter of a century, this was a frequent sight in St. Petersburg: vessels from France, Holland, and England lying against the quay, unloading packing crates and boxes containing paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Franz Hals, and Van Dycks. Inside the palace, Catherine had the crates opened in her presence alone so as to see and judge them first. As the containers were unpacked and the paintings emerged and were propped against the walls, she stood in front of them and walked back and forth studying them, trying to understand them. In her first years of collecting, Catherine valued the paintings she bought less for their visual beauty or artistic technique than for their intellectual and narrative content and for the notice and prestige their acquisition conferred on her.

  On March 25, 1771, the empress surprised Europe again by buying the famous collection of Pierre Crozat, which, since the collector’s death, had passed through many hands. It included eight works by Rembrandt, four by Veronese, a dozen by Rubens, seven by Van Dyck, and several by Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The entire collection came to her with a single exception: Van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I of England, who had been beheaded by Oliver Cromwell. Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, bought this painting because she was convinced that she had Stuart blood. Catherine was pleased when Diderot told her that he had succeeded in acquiring the collection for half its value. Four months later in the same year, Catherine bought 150 paintings from the collection of the Duc de Choiseul. Again, Diderot, who arranged the purchase, estimated that she had paid less than half the market value.

  In 1773, Diderot and Grimm both came to St. Petersburg. Once back in France, Grimm took over Diderot’s role as Catherine’s agent in Paris. She felt more at ease with Grimm; Diderot, like Voltaire, seemed to her a great man who had to be handled carefully; Grimm was a clever, congenial man with whom she exchanged an informal correspondence of more than fifteen hundred letters. Grimm spread his net wide on Catherine’s behalf: it was Grimm, for example, who acquired for her a copy of the sculptor Houdon’s extraordinarily lifelike statue of a seated Voltaire. The original is now in the Comédie Française; Catherine’s copy is in the Hermitage Museum.

  In 1778, the empress received news from her ambassador in London that George Walpole, the spendthrift grandson and heir of Sir Robert Walpole, intended to sell the family’s collection of paintings. Robert Walpole, a Whig who had been prime minister for more than twenty years under George I and George II, had been a lifelong collector of paintings. For thirty-three years, since Robert Walpole’s death, they had been hanging in the family home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Walpole’s grandson, in order to pay his debts and support his passion for raising greyhounds, had decided to sell the entire collection, the finest and most famous private art collection in England, and among the finest in the world. There were almost two hundred paintings, including Rembrandt’s Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, fifteen works by Van Dyck, and thirteen works by Rubens. Catherine wanted them all. After two months of negotiations, she acquired the entire collection for thirty-six thousand pounds.

  The consequence was a storm of public indignation in England. That a foreign empress should be allowed to buy and carry away a British national treasure was intolerable. More than a collection of paintings was being removed from the country; a whole chapter of British history and culture was being shipped away. Horace Walpole, the writer and aesthete who was the grandson’s uncle, had always coveted the collection and expected that one day it would come to him. He called what had happened a “theft.” If he couldn’t have the paintings, he said, “I would rather they were sold to the crown of England than to that of Russia, where they will be burned in a wooden palace at the first insurrection.” A public subscription campaign to buy back the paintings failed. Catherine was never worried. Writing to Grimm, she said, “The Walpole paintings are 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 than a cat would a mouse.”

  The Walpole purchase confirmed Catherine’s reputation as Europe’s foremost collector of art and as the leading prospective customer for all owners with major collections to sell. She continued buying, although more selectively. In 1779, when Grimm recommended purchasing the collection of the French Comte de Baudouin, which contained nine Rembrandts, two Rubenses, and four Van Dycks, she held back, complaining about the price. Grimm reported, “The Comte de Baudouin leaves it to your Majesty to decide conditions, timing, and all other considerations.” Catherine admitted, “It would indeed be discourteous to refuse such a generous offer,” but she did not concede until 1784. “The world is a strange place and the number of happy people very small,” she wrote to Grimm. “I can see that the Comte de Baudouin is not going to be happy until he sells his collection and it appears that I am the one destined to make him happy.” She sent Grimm fifty thousand rubles. When the paintings arrived and were uncrated, Catherine wrote to Grimm, “We are prodigiously delighted.”

  Many wealthy Europeans wished to be considered connoisseurs, and competition in the art market was keen. Catherine was the leader; she was an immensely rich collector who trusted her agents and possessed the self-confidence of one who wants only the best and is willing to pay for it. Later, she confessed that ego and prestige played a part; that she loved to possess, to amass. “It is not love of art,” she admitted, in part facetiously. “It is voracity. I am a glutton.” Her agents continued to buy everything available of beauty and value. During her reign, Catherine’s collection expanded to almost four thousand paintings. She became the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe.

  Catherine was more than a collector; she was also a builder. It was through architecture as well as her collection of paintings that she was determined to leave on St. Petersburg a cultural mark that time would not obliterate. During her reign, architects of genius were commissioned to create elegant public buildings, palaces, mansions, and other structures, all examples and reminders of the larger world she wished Russia to join. Elizabeth had also been a builder, but now Elizabethan baroque exuberance, as manifested by Rastrelli, was succeeded by a sober, pure, neoclassical style. Catherine’s buildings were intended to represent in form and stone her personal character and taste. She preferred to combine simplicity with elegance, employing state
ly columns and geometrical façades built of granite and marble rather than Rastrelli’s brick and painted plaster.

  The huge, baroque Winter Palace, Rastrelli’s signature masterpiece, had taken eight years to build and was completed in 1761, the year Elizabeth died. Painted apple-green and white, with a façade that rose 450 feet, it was a massive structure of 1,050 rooms and 117 staircases. Six months later, when Catherine reached the throne, she found this palace crushing in size and herself stifled by its lush decor. With her love of rationality and order, she rejected the ornate atmosphere of gold, blue, and glitter and looked for an escape. She disliked pomp and crowds, as well as architectural frills; she preferred informal gatherings in small rooms where she could enjoy the intimate companionship of a few close friends. She also wanted a spacious, well-lighted hall nearby to serve as a gallery in which to hang the paintings now arriving on the quay below. To create such a refuge, she turned to a French architect brought to Russia by Ivan Shuvalov, Elizabeth’s favorite during the final years of her reign. Shuvalov had persuaded the empress to permit the founding of a permanent Academy of Art and subsequently had persuaded the French architect Michel Vallin de la Mothe to come to St. Petersburg and build a gallery to house this academy. Catherine, then a grand duchess, had admired Mothe’s new building when it was finished in 1759, and, once on the throne, she commissioned the architect to build something for her.

  In 1765, Mothe designed for Catherine a private retreat and art gallery in which to hang her new paintings. She called it her Hermitage, and subsequently it became known as the Little Hermitage. Mothe attached the three-story building as an annex to Rastrelli’s enormous Winter Palace, and, somehow, perhaps because of its far smaller size, its neoclassical façade was compatible with the huge, ornate Winter Palace next door. Throughout her reign, she used the smaller building as a European town house in which to read, work, and talk. It was here that she met Diderot on his visit to St. Petersburg, Grimm on his two visits, the British ambassador James Harrris, and many others. She could also stroll through its gallery, by herself or surrounded by friends, and reflect on her latest treasures.

  “You should know our mania for building is stronger than ever,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in 1779. “It is a diabolical thing. It consumes money and the more you build, the more you want to build. It’s a sickness like being addicted to alcohol.” She built mostly for others, however. In 1766, she had commissioned Antonio Rinaldi to construct a country palace for Gregory Orlov at Gatchina, thirty miles south of St. Petersburg. It was to Gatchina that Orlov invited Jean-Jacque Rousseau; it was to Gatchina, too, that Catherine placed Orlov in a month’s “quarantine” when, in a rage, he rode back from the south having learned that he had been replaced as Catherine’s favorite by the hapless Vasilchikov. In 1768, she commissioned Rinaldi to build the Marble Palace for Orlov in St. Petersburg, set in a garden facing the Neva River. Rather than constructing a palace of brick and then coating the brick with thick layers of stucco painted in bright colors as Rastrelli might have done, Rinaldi built Orlov’s palace of gray and red granite, faced with different shades of marble: pink, white, and blue-gray. On the façade, Catherine inscribed, “In grateful friendship.”

  Of all the private palaces built for others by Catherine, the largest and most spectacular was constructed for Potemkin. She chose a Russian architect, Ivan Starov, who had spent a decade studying in Paris and Rome. Starov built the unique neoclassical Tauride Palace; when it was finished in 1789, it was considered the finest private residence in Russia. Its domed entry hall led to a gallery of 230 feet lined by Ionic columns and opening onto an enormous winter garden. In 1906, when Tsar Nicholas II established the first Russian State Duma, or parliament, this body, soon to become irrelevant, sat in the Tauride Palace.

  For all the responsibility she gave to Starov, he was not the architect who worked most closely with Catherine and who most fully reflected her personal taste. This was a quiet, unpretentious Scotsman, Charles Cameron. Born in 1743, Cameron was a Jacobite who had studied in Rome. Fascinated by the design of classical antiquities, he had written a book on ancient Roman baths. When he arrived in Russia in the summer of 1779, he was already well known as a designer of neoclassical interiors and furniture. Catherine commissioned him to redesign and decorate her private apartments in the palace at Tsarskoe Selo where she spent her summers. Just as she disliked Rastrelli’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, she found equally unlivable the enormous, bright blue, pistachio green, and white baroque palace Rastrelli had built for Elizabeth at Tsarskoe Selo. Its façade of 326 feet was too large for her; its endless row of elaborately decorated public rooms seemed to her like an ornamented army barracks. Catherine’s first commission for Cameron was to remodel and redecorate the private apartment she used in the palace. This assignment was a test of Cameron’s taste and skill. He created simple, elegant rooms, gentle in color: milky white, light blues, greens, and violet. “I never cease to be surprised by this work,” Catherine wrote Grimm. “I have never seen anything to equal it.” Thereafter, she allowed, and then encouraged, Cameron to use only the most expensive materials: agate, jasper, lapis, malachite, and bronze.

  In 1780, the empress asked Cameron to build a palace for her son, Grand Duke Paul, and his wife, Maria, at Pavlovsk, three miles from Tsarskoe Selo. In 1777, at the birth of her grandson Alexander, the empress had given the couple a thousand acres and a large English park with ponds, bridges, temples, statues, and colonnades. Cameron went to work on the palace, which became Maria’s place of refuge during her many years of widowhood. Today, restored from the terrible damage it suffered during World War II, it is considered a masterpiece.

  Cameron’s next commission was the transformation of another part of the great palace at Tsarskoe Selo. He created the Agate Pavilion, three rooms with walls of solid jasper interspersed with red agate. His ultimate triumph followed: the terrace and colonnade that bears his name, the Cameron Galley. This marble gallery is 270 feet long, set on a granite base with an open-air colonnaded balcony featuring slender Ionic columns. It was placed at the far end of Rastrelli’s palace near Catherine’s new, private apartment and at a sharp left angle, making it perpendicular to the long line of the main building. Between the columns in this covered gallery, Catherine placed more than fifty bronze busts of Greek and Roman philosophers and orators. Surrounded by figures she admired, she sat and read during the summer. When she rose, she could walk to the end of he gallery, which opened onto a sweeping curved staircase divided into two branches, one with steps, the other with a ramp, leading down to the park. In her later years, she could choose to walk slowly up or down, or be pushed in a wheelchair, to or from the park.

  After Cameron, Catherine’s favorite architect was Giacomo Quarenghi, an Italian also designing and building in neoclassical style. Quarenghi arrived in Russia in 1780, two years after Cameron. He began by designing the neoclassical Palladian Theater at the Litttle Hermitage, decorating it with marble columns and statues of playwrights and composers. Quarenghi also designed the austere Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo for Catherine’s beloved grandson Alexander, who became Tsar Alexander I. A century later this palace became the country home of Catherine’s great-great-great-grandson, Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family.

  Not all of the artists encouraged and supported by Catherine came from abroad. The best Russian students at the Academy of Art were being sent abroad in groups of twelve at state expense to spend two, four, or more years studying in France, Italy, or Germany. The greatest portraitists of Catherine’s time were both Ukrainians, Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky; Borovikovsky’s best-known portrait depicts an elderly Catherine walking her dog in the park of Tsarskoe Selo. Another Russian-born artist of Catherine’s day was the architect Georg Friedrich Velten, whose father had come to Russia as Peter the Great’s master cook. The younger Velten studied architecture abroad and, on returning, was commissioned to remove the wooden quays along the Neva River and to face
the embankments with Finnish granite. The architectural continuity of this work, stretching for twenty-four miles along the river, gave the waterfront a stately elegance. At the same time, the solid granite quays served as landing stages where both river traffic and seagoing vessels could tie up and discharge cargo.

  If Catherine sought straight, pure classical lines in her buildings, she wanted the opposite in her parks and gardens. When she transformed the formal Dutch and French gardens at Tsarskoe Selo, her adviser and chief gardener was John Busch, an Englishman of Hanoverian origin, who spoke to the empress in German. Busch’s language ability had been useful when he was cast as the German “innkeeper” during Emperor Joseph II’s visit to Tsarskoe Selo as “Count Falkenstein.” Busch retained the post of gardener for years, and when he retired, he was succeeded by his son, Joseph. Busch also found himself related to Cameron. On arriving in Tsarskoe Selo, the Scottish architect, speaking no Russian or French, moved into Busch’s house; eventually, he married Busch’s daughter.

  Catherine helped design the new park. She liked flowers, shrubs, monuments, obelisks, triumphal arches, canals, and winding paths, and Busch laid these out for her. She wrote to Voltaire, “Now I love to distraction gardens in the English style, the curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes … and I hold in contempt straight lines.… I hate fountains that torture water and force it into a course contrary to its nature.… In a word, Anglomania rules my plantomania.” At the end of her working day, she walked in the park in a plain dress, exercising her dogs and mingling with the public, which, if decently dressed, was freely admitted. It was in the park at Tsarskoe Selo that Alexander Pushkin set the penultimate scene in his story of the Pugachev rebellion, The Captain’s Daughter, written forty years after Catherine’s death. A young woman, the distressed eighteen-year-old betrothed of an imprisoned and wrongly condemned young officer caught up in the rebellion, is walking in the park. She happens to meet a plainly dressed, unaccompanied, middle-aged woman sitting on a bench. The older woman asks why she is upset. The young woman tells her story and says she hopes to find a way to beg for mercy from the empress. The questioner, who “seemed to be about forty,” has “a plump and rosy face … an expression of calm and dignity … blue eyes … a slight smile … and an indescribable charm.” She tells the anxious girl that she often goes to court and will pass her story along to the empress, encouraging her not to lose hope. Soon after, the young woman is summoned to the palace and taken to the empress’s dressing room, where she realizes that the woman she met in the park was Catherine herself. The young officer is pardoned and despair is transformed into joy.