Catherine the Great

Soon imitated by leading aristocrats, this device had been pioneered by Elizabeth at Tsarskoye Selo, where it remained a source of merriment in Catherine’s time:

When the plates are changed you pull a string by the side of everybody’s right hand which goes underneath the table and rings a bell. Your plate goes down, as all round it is composed of so many divisions like stove holes. You write down upon a slate and pencil which is fixed ready, and what you want immediately comes up. A great diversion was from one table to the other to send something or other that served to laugh.⁴¹

Towards the end of the carnival, Dr Dimsdale had to be called when Catherine caught a fever that knocked her off her feet ‘for six whole days, which was highly inconvenient for someone who loves to bustle about and who hates being stuck in bed’.⁴² But this proved to be merely a temporary interruption to her convivial way of life. ‘Those who form her society,’ Lord Cathcart reported, ‘are either young people who are extremely gay, or such as are capable from the vivacity of their disposition to keep pace with those who are younger than themselves.’⁴³

While the northern part of the Small Hermitage was under construction, Catherine decided in March 1768 to build a new gallery along the sides of the hanging garden to house her growing art collection. Some of the finest works to be seen in today’s Hermitage Museum were acquired in these early years. The foundations of the collection had been laid in 1764 with the purchase of 225 paintings belonging to the Berlin picture dealer, Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, whose seventeenth-century Flemish Masters included Jan Steen’s Revellers and Frans Hals’s Young Man Holding a Glove. In the following year, Prince Dimitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn became Catherine’s principal agent in Paris having been appointed ambassador to Versailles at the age of thirty-one. It was thanks to his collaboration with Diderot that the Hermitage acquired Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and a more recent masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paralytic, or the Fruits of a Good Education (1763). When he moved to The Hague in 1768, Golitsyn negotiated the purchase of about 600 paintings—including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Wouvermans and Watteau—from the collection of Count Heinrich von Bruhl, who had amassed his treasures by stealing from his master, Augustus III of Poland. But Golitsyn had not lost touch with Diderot, who helped him to secure Francois Tronchin’s Genevan collection in 1770 and brokered an even more sensational deal in the following year, when Catherine paid the heirs of the Parisian financier Pierre Crozat 460,000 livres for 500 paintings including Giorgione’s Judith, Titian’s Danae and Raphael’s Holy Family. Diderot believed that the collection was worth more than twice as much.⁴⁴

It is hard to say what pleasure Catherine took from most of these purchases. Although her charmed circle included the connoisseurs Alexander Stroganov and Ivan Shuvalov, who spent much of the period between 1763 and 1777 in Italy collecting sculptures for himself and the Hermitage, she seems to have revelled in a kind of inverted snobbery that oscillated between dependence on ‘expert’ opinion and a determination to defy it. She and Lev Naryshkin were ‘professional ignoramuses’, the empress later declared, ‘and we use our ignorance to annoy the Grand Chamberlain Shuvalov and Count Stroganov, who are both members of at least 24 academies’.⁴⁵ She clearly took a liking to Jean Huber’s innovative cycle of portraits of Voltaire in various intimate, everyday poses, which arrived in St Petersburg at the rate of about one a year after Grimm had announced her commission in the Correspondance litteraire in March 1769. ‘I had to burst out laughing when I saw the patriarch getting out of bed,’ Catherine admitted on re-discovering the paintings hidden away at Tsarksoye Selo in 1776. ‘I think that one’s original: the vivacity of his character and the impatience of his imagination give him no time to do one thing at once. The kicking horse being corrected by Voltaire is also very good.’⁴⁶ However, since her early letters reveal little about her personal tastes, it is tempting to conclude that many of the masterpieces arriving in St Petersburg by the carton-load left her unmoved. The sheer scale of her acquisitions prevented any intimate acquaintance with all of them: she bought some 4000 canvases in the first twenty years of her reign.

Apart from the fact that Catherine liked a bargain, the most important benefit conferred by great works of art was international prestige. Like diplomacy, collecting was a competitive business. And paintings, no less than territory, were best acquired at the expense of weakened rivals. Gotzkowsky’s collection was snatched from under the nose of Frederick the Great when financial embarrassments brought about by the Seven Years’ War prevented him from fulfilling his promise to buy them for himself. Paradoxically, such triumphs made it harder for the empress’s agents to strike a confidential deal once her interest leaked out to journalists hungry for gossip on the Parisian art market. In 1768 Bachaumont’s Memoires secrets mocked Diderot’s vain attempts to acquire Louis-Jean Gaignat’s paintings, which foundered on a will forbidding the sale of the collection as a whole. Forced to compete against the duc de Choiseul at auction in February 1769, he eventually acquired only five pictures, including Murillo’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Falconet told Catherine that it was a painting ‘to speak of on one’s knees’. As Diderot discovered, to represent an upstart foreign power that threatened to denude France of such treasures was to invite widespread obloquy. Some feared that the greatest Western masterpieces were disappearing into oblivion. ‘How sad it is to see going and passing into the hands of the Scythians things that are so precious that ten people at most will admire them in Russia,’ complained Jean-Henri Eberts in September 1769. ‘Everyone can aspire to the pleasure of seeing the banks of the Seine, but few are curious to visit those of the cold Neva.’⁴⁷ Diderot himself was more philosophical. Having initially doubted the empress’s ability to collect enough paintings to inspire good taste in art, he gradually acknowledged the changing balance of power. ‘We sell our pictures and our statues in the midst of peace, but Catherine buys them in the midst of war,’ he remarked in rueful admiration to Falconet in April 1772. ‘The sciences, the arts, taste and wisdom climb to the north, and barbarism with its train comes southwards.’⁴⁸

Egged on by Grimm, Diderot’s Neapolitan friend, the economist abbe Galiani, later found a philosophical explanation for these developments in an ironic contrast between Catherine and the king of France. If one wanted to know why ‘the Russians have climbed so high and the French come tumbling down so low under Catherine and Louis XV’, then the causes were to be found ‘in the character, conduct and gestures of their sovereigns’. Both monarchs had encouraged luxury and the arts, and yet ‘French morals have been corrupted, valour has gone soft, while the opposite has happened to the Russians. The reason is that in France they have encouraged a voluptuous luxury which enervates, and in Russia a magnificent luxury which invigorates.’ ‘The cause of the decadence of French military power,’ Galiani concluded, ‘and the aggrandisement of that of the Russians derives from the same principle.’ The Russians would never have won their battles had they been covered ‘in lace and chiffon’.⁴⁹

* * *

Since war was even more expensive than art collecting, its onset led Catherine to tighten her tax policy. She could also draw on a new stream of income because the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1768–74 was the first to be financed by foreign loans, advanced by the Amsterdam finance markets on the strength of her armies’ performance in the Seven Years’ War. These loans in turn prompted unprecedented financial sophistication within Russia as the empress oversaw the introduction of paper money under the aegis of a new bank, created at the end of December 1768 and headed by Andrey Shuvalov. Whereas Peter III had contemplated five notes in 1762, ranging in value from 10 to 500 roubles, Catherine settled for four denominations: 25, 50, 75 and 100. Before long she faced problems of forgery and inflation. ‘I have in my hands a 100-rouble note numbered 80,000’, reported the hostile French ambassador in September 1770. ‘It is from last year: another indication that this operation is overstretched.’ By the end of the war, notes to the value of some 12.7 million roubles were in circulation.⁵⁰ There were short-term worries too. While Count Solms, the Prussian ambassador, was anxious that Shuvalov’s very name would be sufficient to revive ‘disagreeable memories’ of his father—Elizabeth’s unpopular minister, Peter Shuvalov—who had ‘acquired millions at the expense of the state and to the ruin of several individuals’, Catherine was more concerned about the change of culture required in her own Court administration. ⁵¹ As she complained to Yelagin in April 1769:

It is with the greatest possible surprise that I hear that the palace chancellery is refusing to accept state assignats from private individuals. A peasant presented his papers and was told to bring cash. Can it be that my statutes are not valid in the palace chancellery, or do the clerks steal [coins] for their own loathsome gain, when no accounting errors can be made with assignats? Kindly look into this without delay: I beg you to punish those who