NGV Hermitage exhibition: Catherine, Russia’s golden age empress
- The Australian
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Since it was first opened to the world in 1852, Catherine the Great’s remarkable collection of treasures has attracted audiences across the world, with more than three million visitors a year making the pilgrimage to the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
The three million strong collection which is housed in six buildings, anchored by the 1,000 room Winter Palace, was founded by the empress of Russia’s Golden Age after she purchased a small collection from a Berlin dealer in 1764. Astonishingly, her vast collection was built, Dedinkin says, in just three decades.
When Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great opens in the National Gallery of Victory tomorrow, it will be one of the most important touring shows ever to come to Australia: a show, as Mikhail Dedinkin, deputy head of the Hermitage’s western European fine art department points out, that will tell the story of the German child bride who reformed Russia.
Born Sophia Augusta Fredericka on April 21, 1729 in Germany to a minor noble family, Catherine was brought to Russia at 14 to marry the sickly, weak-willed young Peter Ulrich of Holstein, grandson of Peter the Great and the heir chosen by empress Elizabeth, his spinster daughter. Over years of a loveless marriage (she would later describe Peter in her memoirs as an “idiot and drunkard”), she taught herself Russian along with several other languages, steeped herself in the political writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire and classical literature by Tacitus and others, gradually building a power base in the Russian court before succeeding to the throne in 1762 following Peter’s overthrow.
It was the start of a golden cultural age for Russia, Dedinkin says. During her reformist, dynamic reign (1762-96), Catherine would open Russia to the West and the values of the Enlightenment, spark an architectural renaissance and institute sweeping political, cultural, educational and economic reforms.
“I am building, I will build, and will encourage others to build”, she said.
The French envoy at the Russian court, Louis Philippe, comte de Segur, said: “Her court was a meeting place for the leaders of all the nations and the luminaries of her age. Before her, St Petersburg, which had been built in the regions of ice and snow, went practically unnoticed, as if it were in Asia. During her reign, Russia became a European power. St Petersburg occupied a prominent position among the capitals of the civilised world and the imperial throne ranked among the most powerful and important.”
Catherine’s genius is perhaps best preserved in her artistic legacy. Dedinkin says the scale and rate of her acquisitions (courtesy of her considerable financial resources and an army of spotters and dealers including Voltaire and Diderot) was astonishing. She began in 1764 with 317 old masters assembled for Frederick II of Prussia by the Berlin industrialist and financier Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky.
“It was strange, nobody knew what to do with these 300 paintings from Berlin,” Dedinkin says. “At that time, there was no space for these paintings, it was forgotten for a couple of years, but in the middle of the 1760s she started to think again and she got several more important collections, one after the other.”
These included, in 1769, the Heinrich von Bruhl collection, followed by the Crozat collection in 1772. In 1779, she swooped on the collection of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, to the outrage of many, including the descendants of the Walpole estate who felt it belonged in their country. In her bid to create “a unique, great, systematic universal collection of art”, she had to overcome inexperience, and distance from the world’s art markets, Dedinkin says. “But step by step, she developed her eye.”
He recounts Catherine’s work in setting up orphanages, schools, theatres and science and art academies — she herself wrote plays and Russia’s first children’s novels — as well as her bibliophile passions (she bought the libraries of close friends and advisers Voltaire and Diderot) and her pioneering efforts to properly catalogue her art collection and publish detailed inventories for the public.
Her other collecting passions included drawings and architectural designs (St Petersburg’s architectural renaissance came about through her collaborations with Quarenghi, Charles Cameron, Ivan Starov and others) as well as Chinese decorative arts.
For Catherine, art was a powerful agent to encourage social and cultural reform; Ted Gott, senior curator of international art at the NGV, says there was “an instructional and uplifting level to her acquisitions”. A skilled political strategist, Catherine also saw the value of art as a public relations tool, fostering her image as an “enlightened monarch”, according to Russian critic GN Komelova, as well as its role as “a symbol of Russia’s strength and power”, according to Piotrovsky. “She understood that the concept of ‘great’ encompassed not only economy and army but also art collections.”
Catherine’s art collecting passions shaped the growth of the museum and sprouted, almost organically, painting galleries, wings and loggias, pavilions and hanging gardens as her collection grew. When she inherited the Winter Palace in 1762, the magnificent edifice, designed by Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli and built for empress Elizabeth between 1754 and 1762, had 1000 rooms but no dedicated picture galleries. As more paintings arrived, Catherine built additions including the Small Hermitage, the Great Hermitage and the grand Hermitage Theatre.
The exhibition design in Melbourne is planned to mirror the richness of the Hermitage. Visitors will first see the magnificent life-size portrait of Catherine by Alexander Roslin before moving into rooms dedicated to her architectural drawings, her cameo collection, the Cameo Service, different schools of paintings, as well as a room devoted solely to pieces from the Walpole collection, before moving into a final room filled with her chinoiserie collection.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great runs at the National Gallery of Victoria from July 31 to November 8.
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