Catherine the Great

Court, the Board of Public Welfare, and the Conscience Court. One word from your excellency on these subjects would be a ray of light, bringing order out of chaos, as when the world was created.’¹¹¹ In November, Sievers was appointed Governor General of Tver, Novgorod, Olonets and Pskov, an area larger than many European states in which he was given the honour of being the first to put the new reform into practice. As a sign that they had been appointed as the empress’s personal viceroys, he and Zakhar Chernyshev in Belorussia were each rewarded with an English silver service weighing over 45 poods. Catherine eventually paid a total of 125,000 roubles for the two services, setting aside a further 42 roubles and 35 kopecks to provide fur coats for officers in the troop which accompanied the final consignment.¹¹² ‘I think these regulations are better than my Instruction for the code,’ she told Grimm in January 1776. ‘They are being introduced at this moment in the provinces of Tver and Smolensk where they have been received with open arms.’¹¹³

The Court had returned to St Petersburg in December. It would be another ten years before Catherine saw Moscow again. By then, the city and the surrounding provinces had been transformed almost beyond recognition, at least in part by her own reforming zeal. Yet even that transformation paled by comparison with the turbulence in the empress’s personal life.

Photographic Insert

PeterIII’s tutor, Jacob Stahlin, thought Rotari’s portrait of Elizabeth in a black lace mantilla the best likeness of this beautiful, irascible empress. Done in the last years of her life, it passed into the collection of her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov.

^{Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709–61) by Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707–62): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library}

The prevailing myth of a conquering foreign ruler bringing civilization and prosperity to Russia is encapsulated by Vigilius Erichsen’s portrait of the uniformed empress astride Brilliant, the charger she rode out towards Oranienbaum the day after her coup.

^{Equestrian Portrait of Catherine II (1729–96) the Great of Russia by Vigilius Erichsen (1722–82): Musee des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France/The Bridgeman Art Library}

To ensure that enlightened female rule was not mistaken for weakness, Catherine’s image-makers represented her as Minerva, the war-like goddess of Wisdom, from the time of her coronation in 1762. This Parisian snuff-box may well have been made to mark her son’s visit to the French capital, twenty years later.

^{Round snuff-box showing Catherine as Minerva, Paris 1781–2 (gold, verre eglomise, silver): Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen}

‘If ever you catch sight of him, you will see without contradiction the finest man that you have ever encountered in your life.’ Embracing putti symbolise Catherine’s love for Grigory Orlov on the service she commissioned for him from the Imperial Porcelain Factory sometime between 1762 and 1765.

^{Tea caddy, coffeepot, and teapot from the Orlov Service, St. Petersburg, Imperial Porcelain Factory, 1762–5: Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen}

Completed as she arrived in Russia, Rastrelli’s Summer Palace on the Fontanka was an exuberant timber fantasy that survived Catherine’s reign, along with many other features of a Baroque Court, before being demolished by order of Paul I.

^{The Summer Palace, St. Petersburg, Russian School (18th century): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library}

Exemplified by the Green Dining Room, Charles Cameron’s cool interiors at Tsarskoye Selo marked the triumph of the restrained neoclassical style in Russian architecture from the late 1770s.

^{Summer Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, Green Dining Room, designed by Charles Cameron, 1784–91: Bridgeman Art Library, London}

The empress’s comedies and operatic pageants played to select audiences at Giacomo Quarenghi’s neoclassical Hermitage Theatre, which opened on 22 November 1785. Catherine entered from the adjoining Hermitage, guests from the granite-clad embankment, itself admired as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.

^{The Hermitage Theatre seen from Vasilevsky Island, 1822 (colour lithograph), Russian School (19th century): Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library}

Done in Kiev in 1787, Mikhail Shibanov’s portrait of the empress in travelling dress combines the image of a maternal ruler with the expansionist ambitions represented by the insignia of three chivalric orders: St Andrew the First Called (founded by Peter I), St George (founded ‘for bravery’ during the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74) and St Vladimir (founded in 1782, the year in which the empress outlined her ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II of Austria).

^{Catherine II in a travelling costume, 1787 by Mikhail Shibanov (f1.1783–89): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library}

‘His rarest quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which set him completely apart from the rest of humanity.’ Potemkin’s outsized personality is well captured in Giovanni Battista Lampi’s celebration of his martial valour, painted in the last year of the prince’s life.

^{Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin (1739–91), c.1790 by Johann Baptist I Lampi (1751– 1830): Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library}

Small as it was, the palace at Zerbst provided Catherine’s father, Prince Christian August, with the quintessentially cosmopolitan setting of a Baroque Court in miniature.

^{The Schloss at Zerbst}

Boisterous in private, discreet and demure in public, the young Grand Duchess Catherine set out on her arrival at the Russian Court ‘to please the grand duke, to please the empress, and to please the nation’.

^{The young Grand Duchess Catherine soon after her marriage, after Grooth}

Few eighteenth-century princes escaped unscathed at the hands of second-rate artists. Peter III was no exception. The Synodal painter Aleksey Antropov captured something of the fabled vacuity of Catherine’s ill-fated husband.

^{Peter III, engraving after A. P. Antropov}

While the empress’s memoirs implied that Paul I was the progeny of Sergey Saltykov, her son always regarded Peter III as his father and resembled him strongly in both personality and physique.

^{Paul I, English engraving of the 1790s}

Modelling his illustrations of Catherine’s coronation on those of the French kings at Reims, Jean-Louis de Veilly transformed the intimate interior of the Cathedral of the Dormition into a cavernous temple.

^{Catherine’s coronation: nineteenth-century engraving after J. L. de Veilly}