Catherine the Great

which go around the alcove. It’s charming, and this invention by your humble servant is currently being adopted in all the houses in Petersburg. Besides, my bed is not at all in the imperial style: it has only curtains.¹⁰⁵

Much more in the imperial style was the empress’s growing art collection. When Potemkin first took Corberon to the Hermitage in January 1776, he found ‘a lot of pictures, badly displayed’:

The gallery is too narrow; there is not enough space to see them and the windows don’t reach high enough, or rather, they descend too low. These are ordinary casements, unlike those in the gallery at Kassel. Here I noticed, with sorrow, Greuze’s Paralytic: it has lost its colour and its effect; it is diminished now.¹⁰⁶

The answer was to build a bigger gallery—the Large Hermitage—and to keep on making acquisitions to fill it. Catherine’s most significant purchase in these years was from the bankrupt descendants of Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall, where a formal portrait of the empress, offered in part exchange, still dominates the saloon. The Walpole collection, which included Rembrandt’s Abraham and Isaac, was so important that John Wilkes had proposed to Parliament that it be purchased from public funds as the basis for a new National Gallery. George Walpole, the third earl, had other ideas. As Horace Walpole reported in December 1778, ‘the mad master’ had ‘sent his final demand of forty-five thousand pounds to the Empress of Russia’. In the end, she paid ?40,555 in a sale negotiated by her ambassador in London. ‘Russia is sacking our palaces and museums,’ moaned Josiah Wedgwood.¹⁰⁷

Despite her support for the Imperial Academy of Arts at St Petersburg, Russian painters scarcely figured in her collection. For the lucky neoclassical artists who impressed her foreign agents—Grimm in Paris and Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in Rome—Catherine’s patronage offered a potential bonanza. Anton Raphael Mengs was already approaching the end of a life of service to the Courts of Dresden and Madrid when she first expressed interest in his work in 1776. By the time Perseus and Andromeda (1777) arrived in the Hermitage, shortly after the departure of Joseph II, he had been dead for a year. ‘The fever takes hold of me, too, when I think of the state Mengs is in,’ Catherine told Grimm during the artist’s final illness. ‘I hope all the great men of our century are not destined to die before the year 1780.’¹⁰⁸ Clerisseau, whose drawings of Rome arrived in the same consignment as the Mengs, was still very much alive, having recovered from his earlier embarrassment to trade so openly on the empress’s fondness for his work that a scandal erupted when Paul inadvertently snubbed him in Paris.¹⁰⁹ It was there that Alexander Stroganov showed off the bust of Catherine commissioned from Jean-Antoine Houdon. She herself had ordered a bust of Voltaire, whose death in 1778 at the beginning of her infatuation for Rimsky-Korsakov had made her feel ‘a very great contempt for all the things of this world’.¹¹⁰ All Europe echoed Jeremy Bentham’s mock awe at her well-publicised aspiration to build a replica of Ferney: ‘Kitty you will find is going to erect a monument to him, in the middle of Petersburgh and to have a model of his house in her park at Czarskozelo.’¹¹¹ In the end, she settled for buying his library for the Hermitage. It arrived in 1779, seven years before Diderot’s books finally made their way to St Petersburg, to be placed in the care of A. I. Luzhkov, still not thirty, who had translated the Encyclopedie article on ‘political economy’ for Catherine’s Society of Translators.¹¹² Yet by no means all her purchases pleased her. Returning to town with the newly inoculated grand dukes in September 1781, shortly after their parents’ departure for Vienna, Catherine complained to Grimm about the latest delivery from Rome. It was if the rain had somehow obscured her vision:

To my great astonishment, except for the Mengs and a few other trifles, all the rest, except for the Raphael loggias, are nasty daubs: I have told Martinelli, the painter who takes care of my gallery, to choose [the best] and send the daubs to auction for the benefit of the civic hospital. Heavens above! It is incredible how the divine one [Reiffenstein] has allowed himself to go wrong this time: I beg you to ask him expressly to buy no more from Monsieur Jenkins. It is scandalous to pass off such banalities under the name of this or the other painter. My guests at the Hermitage were ashamed to go in there ahead of me.¹¹³

Some reasonably assumed that there must be no end to Catherine’s resources. When a French craftsman set his price in 1776 for a writing desk to commemorate the victory at Chesme, Grimm thought the sum ‘so ridiculous’ that he expected the deal to be cancelled. Yet, as he later explained to the French foreign minister, ‘it turned out otherwise. The empress, who likes to encourage artists in extraordinary projects—and who perhaps intended this escritoire as a mark of her munificence—ordered me to have it done.’¹¹⁴ In reality, even Catherine’s budget was overstretched. In 1778, she had her ambassador in Paris commission a 744-piece Sevres service. (It was a gift for ‘my dear, beloved Prince Potemkin, but so that it should be all the finer, I have said that it is for me’.) Each plate was priced at 242 livres, the sugar bowls at 1410 livres, and the liqueur decanter at 2236 livres, making a grand total of 328,188 livres (roughly 41,000 roubles at the rate of exchange given by Bentham in June 1778). But when it emerged in the following year that the full amount had not been paid, part of the service was held back in compensation and it was not until 1857 that officials acting on behalf of her youngest grandson, Nicholas I, acquired the missing pieces.¹¹⁵ The tension between ambition and economy remained unresolved in many of Catherine’s commissions. No one was to learn this sooner than Giacomo Quarenghi, one of two Italians recommended by Grimm in 1779 when the empress complained that Rinaldi and her other architects were ‘too old, or too blind, or too slow, or too lazy, or too young, or too slothful, or too much the grand seigneur, or too rich, or too respectable, or too stale’.¹¹⁶ Having been ordered to design new bronze doors for her bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo in 1784, Quarenghi warned Betskoy that ‘although Her Majesty desires that these doors should be as sumptuous as possible, if Your Excellency finds the price rising too high, bronze could be used only for the locks and the doorframes’.¹¹⁷ Most of his subsequent designs were supplied with alternative specifications, allowing for variations in cost.

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It had cost Catherine more than 7 million roubles to keep Khan Shagin Girey on the Crimean throne since 1774 and by the end of the decade she was beginning to question the value of her investment. The revolt that broke out in the khanate in the winter of 1780–81 threatened to topple her handsome puppet altogether. By May 1782, he had been forced to flee to the Russian port of Kerch, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov. After Potemkin had been sent to quell the rebellion on 1 September, Catherine outlined the clearest statement so far of the ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II contemplating joint Austro-Russian action to deliver Europe from the Turk. But there was no hope of achieving her grandest ambitions just yet. Though her partner returned from the Crimea in late October convinced of the need for outright annexation—diplomats noticed that he was now a man with a mission—Catherine remained hesitant, anxious about the reaction of rival powers. She was brought round to his way of thinking in the spring of 1783. So long as France and Britain were paralysed by the War of American Independence, Russia had little to fear. The preliminary peace the two powers had signed in January was an added incentive not to delay. On 8 April, the empress issued a manifesto signalling her intention to annexe the strategically significant peninsula. That same month, her partner returned to the South, exasperating her this time by his prevarication. ‘I expected that the Crimea would be occupied by the middle of May,’ she complained, ‘and now here we are in the middle of July and I know nothing more about it than the Pope in Rome.’¹¹⁸

She did not have long to wait. Five days before this impatient letter was written, Potemkin had already secured the prize. As usual, his jubilation was soon followed by physical collapse, prompting renewed anxieties in Catherine’s heart. It was to be November before he returned to St Petersburg. There, far from receiving a hero’s welcome, he found that his triumphs had merely intensified his rivals’ jealousies. Their resentments seemed to affect the empress, who treated him with unanticipated coolness. From then on, he was to spend more and more time in the South. On 2 February 1784, Catherine appointed him Governor General of the new province of the Tauride, incorporating the former Crimean khanate. The tensions between her and the prince were partially resolved by a division of spoils which made him the effective ruler of some of the most productive lands in her empire.

No sooner had this crucial relationship been resolved than another old friendship, potentially no less difficult to handle, was reignited. After a long period of residence in Europe, during which her son had studied at the University of Edinburgh, Princess Dashkova returned to St Petersburg. Her reception at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July