In June 1774, a notice appeared in several London newspapers advertising tickets to see “a Table and Dessert service.” Each day for a month, carriages created a traffic jam as aristocrats arrived at the Greek Street showroom to admire plates and serving pieces depicting their own country estates. “It consists I believe of as many pieces as there are days of the year, if not hours,” wrote Mary Delany, a member of London’s “bluestocking” literary circle.1
Ambitious Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood made sure to invite Queen Charlotte and her brother, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, along with the visiting Swedish royals, to see the exhibit. Not only was Wedgwood’s show a clever marketing ploy, it proved to be a propaganda coup for his client. By September 1774, Catherine was unpacking the exhibit—twenty-two crates of her new Green Frog Service.
Wedgwood’s “Great Patroness in the North” was a repeat customer. Six years earlier, Wedgwood persuaded Britain’s ambassador to Russia to be his sales agent. Within a year, Lord Cathcart secured four orders, including a twenty-four-person table service for the Winter Palace. Featuring the scallop-edged “Queen’s Shape” from the Queen Charlotte’s breakfast service, Catherine’s “Husk Service” arrived in fall of 1770, named for its lilac wheat husk borders.
Catherine’s second order was far more challenging. While leaving the style and specific decoration to Wedgwood, she required that each piece be hand-painted with a different, topographically accurate British view, preferably Gothic. The order represented the commission of a lifetime, but Wedgwood had one major concern. He’d recently undertaken an ambitious commission for Frederick the Great with scenes of his domains, but it was smaller in scale. “Suppose the Empress should die,” the practical potter wrote his partner Thomas Bentley, “it will be a very expensive business.”2 Contacting the empress directly, Wedgwood convinced her that the service she requested—almost 1,000 hand-painted pieces—would cost far more to execute than the £500 suggested by Alexander Baxter, Russian consul in London. In the end, Catherine paid £2,700 for the elaborate Green Frog Service.
Wedgwood’s first challenge was finding enough views of English castles, abbeys, country estates, landscapes, ruins, and gardens. To help, Wedgwood hired an artist to “take 100 views upon the road” around his hometown of Staffordshire with a camera obscura.3 Flattered to have their estates depicted for the “first Empress in the World,” British landowners also allowed Wedgwood’s artists to sketch from their collections. Hundreds of sketches were submitted to Bentley, who matched the views with the shapes of the various pieces.
In the foreword of his handwritten catalogue for Catherine, Bentley described the romantic views: “The principal subjects are: the ruins, the most remarkable buildings, parks, gardens and other natural curiosities which distinguish Great Britain . . . specimens of architecture of all ages and styles, from the most ancient to our present day; from rural cottages and farms, to the most superb palaces; and from the huts of the Hebrides to the masterpieces of the best known English architects.”4 In the end, the set included a dinner service (680 pieces) and a dessert service (264), for a total of 944 items. Because some pieces like Stowe and Windsor Castle featured multiple illustrations, the total number of hand-painted views reached 1,222.
The unlikely mastermind behind this unique service was the thirteenth and youngest child from “a dirty spot of Earth” in the Midlands. After years of experimentation, Josiah Wedgwood perfected what he called creamware—an ivory-white earthenware both lighter and stronger than porcelain. Wedgwood’s career took off in 1765 when he presented Queen Charlotte with an exquisite creamware breakfast set featuring raised sprigs of green flowers against a gold background. Charlotte and George III were so delighted, they named the 36-year-old “Potter to Her Majesty” and ordered a complete dinner service. The savvy potter quickly rebranded his creamware “Queen’s ware.”
Though Wedgwood duplicated the “queen’s shape” for some of Catherine’s pieces, he created new compotiers, cream bowls, and ice cream dishes known as “Catherine shape.” After being molded and fired at the Etruria Factory in Staffordshire, the pieces were sent to Wedgwood’s Chelsea studios outside of London where some thirty artists copied the chosen views from engravings, topographical books, and pictures. A border of oak sprigs embellished the dinner service; ivy leaves framed the border of the dessert service. Each monochrome scene was painted in sepia enamel—a mix of purple and black pigments that appeared mulberry in color against the cream glaze. At Catherine’s request, Wedgwood added a tiny green painted frog on a heraldic shield on each green and purple border.
The Green Frog Service represented Catherine’s first large-scale order from a British company. Brimming with political meaning, the celebrated service was a highly visible gesture of diplomacy between Russia and Britain. Ties between the two countries dated back to Peter the Great’s 1698 visit when he lived in Greenwich and worked in the Deptford shipyards. Thanks to a 1766 commercial treaty (lasting two decades), Russia enjoyed a thriving trade with England. George III had supported Catherine during the Russo-Turkish War, allowing her fleet to sail through the English Channel and Straits of Gibraltar to the Eastern Mediterranean for the surprise attack at Chesme.
The British Empire had become one of the largest in the world; its stable government was lauded by Voltaire and Montesquieu. Early in her reign, Catherine had hoped to base Russia’s constitutional reforms on Britain’s constitution and political structure. She may also have looked to Britain’s cultured aristocracy as a model for her own courtiers. In addition to its political message, the Green Frog Service reflected Catherine’s self-described “Anglomania” which she shared with Potemkin. Catherine, who spoke fluent German, French, and Russian, took daily English lessons. She chose English physician Thomas Dimsdale to give her a groundbreaking smallpox inoculation and named her beloved Italian greyhounds (a gift from the doctor) Sir Thomas and Duchess Anderson. She had a passion for English landscape gardens which she described to Voltaire in June 1772: “Now I love to distraction gardens in the English style, the curving lines, the gentle slopes, ponds like lakes . . . and I hold in contempt straight lines and twin alleys. . . . I hate fountains which torture water to make it take a course contrary to nature; in a word, my plantomania is dominated by anglomania.”5
The ultimate armchair traveler, Catherine experienced English country houses and gardens through a rich collection of illustrated books and engravings, along with travel reports by her courtiers. When Catherine’s former lover Stanislaus Poniatowski first arrived in St. Petersburg as secretary to the new British ambassador, he shared descriptions of Stowe, Prior Park, Wilton, and Oxford. After seizing power, Catherine ordered the tops of hedges and bushes at Tsarskoe Selo left unclipped. She was also inspired by the gardens created by her second cousin, Prince Franz II of Anhalt-Dessau.
Many of Catherine’s imperial parks, including the English Park at Peterhof, were created by English and Scottish landscape gardeners. In 1769, she recruited Scot Charles Sparrow and his brother John to create an English garden at Gatchina. Catherine sent Vasily Neelov and his son on a garden tour of England; they brought back prints of Stowe, Kew, Studley Royal, and Wilton. Neelov was soon collaborating with English gardener John Bush for Catherine’s English park at Tsarskoe Selo.
Wedgwood earned just a £200 profit on the service for Russia’s empress. Though it was basically a breakeven, the renowned service launched Wedgwood into one of the first global brands, allowing him to become “vase maker to the universe.”6 Wedgwood benefited greatly from the Catherine Effect. Russia’s nobility couldn’t get enough of his fashionable creamware. In just the month of August 1789, his firm shipped 18,449 pieces of pottery to Russia.7
Until the Revolutionary War temporarily slowed exports, Wedgwood also shipped huge quantities of creamware to the American colonists, whom he supported. Catering to the popularity of classical objects, Wedgwood began creating cameo medallions and urn-shaped vases with swags and garlands. Catherine remained an avid patron, ordering Wedgwood medallions to decorate her new bedroom at Tsarskoe Selo.
Replacing the traditional imperial crest on her dining service with one thousand tiny frogs may seem eccentric. But like many of Catherine’s commissions, the Green Frog Service was part of a sophisticated ensemble. Catherine conceived the unique creamware service to complement a Gothic Revival castle underway ten miles south of St. Petersburg. The castle was originally called Kekerekeksinen, Finnish for “frog marsh,” but Catherine preferred the French version: La Grenouillère.
In 1774, Catherine tapped Yury Velten to design the castle for stopovers between the Winter Palace and Tsarskoe Selo. Thanks to his elegant granite Neva embankments and neoclassical South Pavilion at the Winter Palace, Velten had become one of Catherine’s favorite architects. Around this time, Catherine also ordered repairs to the frequently used roads between St. Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo, and Peterhof. Elegant obelisks of colored marble and granite were installed every two thirds of a mile.
The six-year war with Turkey had unleashed a wave of nationalism in Russia. Some historians speculate that by commissioning a neo-Gothic, medieval-style castle, Catherine was likening the Russo-Turkish War to the medieval crusades. Having grown up in Germany and visited her grandfather’s 12th-century castle, Catherine was also familiar with medieval architecture. Catherine seems to have steered her architect to Longford Castle in Wiltshire, on the banks of the Avon River, which achieved literary fame as the castle of Amphialus in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.8 The late-16th-century castle was depicted on a serving dish cover in the Green Frog Service.
From selecting the marshy setting and architectural style, to participating in its neoclassical interior design, Catherine was actively involved in the project. She may even have made drawings for the complex. “I was fortunate to take part in the construction of numerous monuments to Your Imperial Majesty’s reign by executing Your Own designs and I continue to keep a collection of drawings made by Your Majesty’s hand,” Yury Velten later wrote.9 Both to enhance the medieval effect and help drain the frog-infested site, Velten surrounded his “toy castle” with a moat. Based on a triangular plan, the castle evoked a medieval fortified palace with rotundas on both stories, round stair towers at each of its three corners, and a massive central tower with a crenellated parapet. For an added Gothic touch, Velten added lancet windows and battlements.
Catherine used the Round Hall in the central turret to present the Order of St. George, Russia’s highest military honor, to commanders like Field Marshals Kutuzov and Suvorov. For the gatherings, Catherine commissioned the St. George Service from the Gardner Porcelain Factory as a symbol of Russian military glory. On a velvet-covered table in front of the red velvet throne, Catherine placed the Chesme Inkwell by Barnabé Augustin de Mailly. The Parisian goldsmith turned Catherine’s order for a writing set into a spectacular piece of jewelry art. To a warship deck made of ormolu, silver, and ebony, de Mailly added cannons, mortars, military trophies, and miniature paintings with episodes of the Russo-Turkish War. Between mortar guns, the lid of a small box in the form of a miniature rug showed the burning of the Turkish fleet in Chesme. The mortar guns doubled as a sandbox and penknife holder; the cannons as candlesticks. True to form, Catherine did not like the mast and had it removed from the inkstand.
From the start, Catherine used her own portraiture to legitimize her reign. Now she reinforced that legitimacy by assembling a portrait gallery of Europe’s royal houses, which she would preside over. In 1774, she commissioned Fedot Shubin to produce nearly five dozen white marble portrait medallions of Russia’s princes and tsars, from Rurik to Elizabeth I. Displayed on the upper part of the walls of the circular state gallery, each of Shubin’s framed oval low relief portraits featured an inscription with the subject’s name and birthday (housed today at the Kremlin Armory, Moscow). In ten adjoining rooms, Catherine hung full-length portraits of the crowned heads of Europe and their families.
Though some of the nearly five dozen portraits were gifts from her ambassadors, the project wound up being an expensive whim, costing over 32,000 rubles. Despite this large investment, the quality of the canvases was uninspired. After a tour of the castle in June 1779, Sir James Harris wrote: “. . . a few days ago [Catherine] carried me with only two of her courtiers, to a country place, where she has placed the portraits of all the crowned heads of Europe. We discoursed much of their several merits; and still more on the great demerits of the modern portrait painters. . . .”10
Upstairs, visitors entered a small square room hung with portraits of Catherine with her greyhound on a chair, and Paul and Natalia Alekseyevna. Next came the English Room, with half a dozen portraits. In 1774, a gift of paired portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte Sophia by Nathaniel Dance arrived, followed four years later by a double portrait of the future George IV and his brother Prince Frederick by American expat Benjamin West. Other rooms displayed portraits of Prussian, Swedish, Hapsburg, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Sardinian royals. Catherine commissioned several portraits of the French royal family in 1773, including a portrait of Louis XV by Thomir and portraits of Marie Antoinette, Comte Charles d’Artois, and Charles’s wife Marie-Therese de Savoie by Alizard.
Catherine had an ironic attitude toward her contemporaries, especially Austria’s conservative Maria Theresa, who had sixteen children. The portraits of Europe’s crowned heads inspired her to pen an imaginative short story. In Chesme Palace: The Conversation between Portraits and Medallions, a palace guard sees the royal portraits come to life and chat with one another. “While an old sentry was making his rounds of Chesme Palace, he suddenly heard a noise. He pricked up his ears and to his great surprise realized that the portraits and medallions that were housed in the palace were exchanging remarks with one another. . . .”11 In the Prussian Room, “Frederick asks brother Henry who is this bearded man? We should not judge people by their beards.”
Catherine also included this exchange among portraits: Louis XVI: I seek to do good. His queen: I kiss you, majesty, for these marvelous words, and I will honor them by giving a ball for you this evening . . . Empress Maria-Theresa (the queen’s mother): Antoinette so loves society that I fear for the health of her soul . . . Joseph II: But she is so beautiful, so lovable, so young.”12