Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.
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 habitue 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 Bruhl, 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 Comedie Francaise; 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
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 stately columns and geometrical facades built of granite and marble rather than Rastrelli’s brick and painted plaster.
