While Sir Robert Walpole’s masterworks were a hard act to follow, Catherine wanted to keep her acquisitions from abroad rolling, although she felt a change in medium was due. After the arrival of the prime minister’s trove, Catherine shifted her focus and resources from paintings to sculpture and decorative art. Perhaps in reaction to having grown up in comparatively modest circumstances and finding Empress Elizabeth’s decorating lacking, Catherine adorned her many urban and suburban palaces with beautiful furnishings.
“The court at that time was so poorly furnished that mirrors, beds, chairs and chests-of-drawers would be removed from the Winter Palace to the Summer Palace, from there on to Peterhof and once we even went to Moscow with them,” Catherine recalled of her days as grand duchess. “When moving the furniture we broke much of it but would put it back in its place without it being repaired.”1
In late 1751, Catherine took matters into her own hands. “I decided to buy, little by little and out of my own pocket, commodes, tables and the most essential items of furniture both for the Winter Palace and for the Summer Palace, and so when we decamped from one place to the other I could find everything I needed without the slightest difficulty and with no losses in transit.”2 With these purchases, dragging furniture from palace to palace each season was no longer necessary.
Enjoying a seemingly unlimited budget, she redecorated the Romanov palaces with objects by Europe’s most fashionable artisans and cabinetmakers. As Isabel de Madariaga explains, Catherine’s prodigious building proved a huge boon not just to painting and sculpture, but to all the decorative arts—including furniture—as new pieces were needed to decorate and furnish the new buildings in appropriate style.3 Like her other art collections, the ostentatious display of decorative arts was intended to advertise the sophistication of her court and her enlightened rule.
According to Catherine’s secretary, she began her day at a small kidney-shaped table. “She came into the bedroom at 10 and sat on a chair upholstered in silk, in front of a curbed table,” wrote Adrian Gribovsky. “A similar table and chair, for her secretary, faced her. The table tops were adorned with inlaid bouquets, landscapes and diverse ornamentation.” Catherine’s often ended her day over a card game like racamboul or whist.4
In 1783, Melchior Grimm introduced Catherine to Europe’s most celebrated furniture maker. “May I tell you about a man who at this time is on his way to St. Petersburg,” Grimm began. “This is Monsieur Roentgen, famous Herrnhuter, undoubtedly the best cabinet-maker of this century. He comes to you because the finest minds attract each other. Since Your Majesty cannot go to Neuwied am Rhine, the celebrated Roentgen is on his way to St. Petersburg on the Newa. Neuwied is the theatre of his glory as the universe is that of Catherine II. France, Germany and Holland ring with his fame. However, all this does not suffice to serve his ambition.
“He is leaving his large establishment to bring a piece of furniture to Your Majesty’s attention. It is unique and has been built especially for you. It has no equal nor will have. He asks nothing better than to submit it to Your Majesty’s judgment. If your majesty does not care for it, he will take it back to Neuwied and, as a good Herrnhutian, seek consolation in Christ Who is dear to him. Do, I beg you, favor him by inspecting his work because this alone is the purpose of this noteworthy man’s journey.”5
Catherine responded to Grimm’s glowing reviews: “The Herrnhuter cabinet maker/mechanic will be welcome here, because we are building more than ever.”6 When Roentgen arrived at the Winter Palace the following May for an audience with Catherine, he was already supplying furniture, clocks, and musical instruments to the Vatican and royal palaces of Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Stockholm. He employed some one hundred artisans at his factory in Neuwied, a port on the Rhine River north of Koblenz. After visiting the workshop, Goethe compared its cabinetry to “palaces in a fairyland.”
When David Roentgen took over his father Abraham’s factory in 1772, he introduced mechanical innovations, neoclassical styling, and personalized marketing. Business boomed as his distinctive designs became status symbols for Europe’s royals. The workshop’s earlier rococo-style furniture was distinguished by refined marquetry—designs inlaid in different woods. Unlike many of their competitors, the Roentgens did not use hot sand to shade wood or engraving tools to add detail. Every detail was executed in different colored wood.
David Roentgen seized the opportunity to add Russia’s trendsetting empress to his A-list clientele. Among the fifty pieces of furniture he hauled 1,100 miles from Neuwied to St. Petersburg were two writing desks, a monumental clock, a chest of drawers, large and small desks with writing stands, and an architect’s table for Catherine’s five- and six-year-old grandsons. But the pièce de résistance was the extraordinary Apollo Desk. After Roentgen learned from Grimm that the empress loved antiquity, architecture, and dogs, he cleverly packaged all three together in a neoclassical mahogany desk.
A statue of the sun god Apollo and the muses on Mount Parnassus (by François Rémond after Louis-Simon Boizot’s model) topped the bureau, while bronze sphinxes, an ancient symbol of female wisdom, flanked the slanted front lid. Opening the lid for Catherine, Roentgen revealed a palace façade guarded by a bronze figure of Zémira, her favorite greyhound (Zémira slept in Catherine’s bedroom in a cradle lined in pink silk and accompanied the empress on her daily walks).
When Catherine touched the dog-shaped knob, the palace façade dropped down, exposing compartments for documents and precious objects. To Catherine’s delight, Zémira also activated a carillon of flute and clavichord music. A single brass cylinder carried a playlist of four melodies—changeable with a lever underneath the desktop. To improve the acoustics, Roentgen covered the lower central panel with cloth. The musical mechanism was the invention of master clockmaker Peter Kinzing, who also engineered levers and knobs that made panels fling open revealing hidden pigeonholes. Roentgen added a stand for paper and side containers for quill pens and ink. Deep inside the desk was a cabinet for secreting medals and jewelry. Its seven mahogany drawers featured bronze medallions decorated with ring-shaped handles and men and women in profile.
Not only did Catherine pay Roentgen’s asking price of 20,000 rubles for the desk, she threw in a gold snuffbox and a 5,000 ruble bonus. To put this in perspective, St. Petersburg’s Yusupov Palace sold around the same time for a similar amount. The Apollo Desk would come to be regarded as a Russian national treasure. But Roentgen’s second meeting with Catherine the following month didn’t go nearly as well.
While chatting in German, Roentgen, a member of the dissident Protestant sect known as the Moravian Brethren (German Quakers), expressed his strong opposition to slavery, a clear reference to Russian serfdom. Catherine got up and left. The next day, she informed the cabinetmaker that she’d buy two desks but only pay for one—punishment for his proselytizing. “Your Mr. Roentgen fell upon us with a cargo of furniture which you cannot imagine,” Catherine wrote Grimm. “He would also have liked to have ‘herrnhutized’ us at the Hermitage, but it is all too much a question of sheep and lambs in this business, his mealy-mouthed manner was not to our taste; the furniture paid for, keys delivered, he had to pack up his beliefs, and all the people at the Hermitage were saved from the bore of all bores. . . .”7
By raising the subject of slavery, Roentgen had touched a raw nerve. There’s no doubt that Catherine, who saw herself as Europe’s enlightened monarch, must have felt some lingering guilt about her decision not to reform serfdom. Confronted with resistance from Russia’s powerful landowners in 1764, she made the politically expedient decision to abandon her early efforts and focus instead on territorial expansion through war with the Ottomans. Eliminating the institution of serfdom, the foundation of Russia’s nobility and economy, was not as simple as “freeing” the serfs. It would have required extensive legislation to see the transition through smoothly without uprooting the entirety of Russian society. Not only did Catherine fail to eliminate the institution, serfdom increased during her reign. She herself granted hundreds of thousands of serfs to her favorites and advisers.
Even as Roentgen’s politics made her uncomfortable, Catherine could not resist his remarkable furniture. Ten days later, she wrote, “We [she and Roentgen] conversed in a very civil way on the subject of furniture and I have bought for Pella its second collection. . . .” A month after Roentgen left St. Petersburg, she wrote that “his furniture is very finely and precisely made, especially those pieces with mechanical devices.”8
Shipments of Roentgen furniture continued. With their neoclassical proportions and gilded bronze, the magnificent tables, desks, consoles, and clocks were perfect for Catherine’s new Large Hermitage. Catherine installed the Apollo Desk here alongside her art. “The rooms overlooking the Neva are decorated with very refined taste: the floors are inlaid, the ceilings have painted inserts,” noted Johann Georgi. “There are big rounded plate-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, silk curtains with tassels, richly embellished fire-places or ceramic stoves, doors with mirrors, corner tables, clocks, sofas and the like furnishings filling the rooms.”9
For Catherine, one of the world’s most cultivated women of letters, Roentgen’s desks were especially prized. Every day, she spent hours corresponding with lovers, officials, philosophers, and art agents. With their hidden compartments, Roentgen’s bureaus also allowed the added benefit of secrecy. Roentgen also designed his desks and chairs with the mathematics of writing in mind. In his article on writing for the Encyclopédie, French master scribe Piassot identified three things that make good writing: a beautiful day (good, natural light), a solid table, and a comfortable chair. According to Carolyn Sargentson, Roentgen calibrated chair and desk heights so his patrons could sit at the correct angle to the table and hold a quill at the proper angle—four to five finger widths from the body.10
But in late June, three months after Roentgen’s first visit to St. Petersburg, tragedy struck. After four years together, 26-year-old Alexander Lanskoy, the beloved Sashenka, died in Catherine’s arms, a victim of diphtheria. The suddenness of his passing proved overwhelming. “My happiness is over,” Catherine wrote Grimm from Tsarskoe Selo. “I thought I too would die at the irreparable loss of my best friend just eight days ago. Sobbing and in deep sorrow, I must tell you that General Lanskoi is no more.”11 Potemkin rushed back from the south to comfort Catherine. For a month, she refused to allow her lover to be buried. When Lanskoy was finally buried in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, she did not attend. It wasn’t until September that Catherine appeared in public.
In addition to art, Catherine had lavished Lanskoy with gifts estimated at seven million rubles. These include two houses in St. Petersburg, a house at Tsarskoe Selo, and 80,000 rubles’ worth of buttons for his ceremonial caftan.12 Though Catherine also gave Lanskoy’s relatives promotions and awards, her largesse failed to win over his disapproving family who considered the couple’s age disparity scandalous. Alexander’s disdainful brother Yakov Lanskoy commissioned the painting The Last Judgment showing the Lanskoys residing in heaven while atoning Alexander is disfigured by the fires of Gehenna.
Lanskoy left his fortune, including artworks and library, to Catherine. She had the splendid parquet floors from his St. Petersburg residence reinstalled in her new Agate Pavilion at Tsarskoe Selo. On her order, Karl Leberecht created a medal representing Lanskoy on one side and an obelisk with the inscription “From Catherine, to friendship” on the other. Charles Cameron erected a monument to the young man at Tsarskoe Selo emblazoned with a large version of Leberecht’s medal, along with the inscription: “What great pleasure for noble souls to see virtue and merit crowned by praise from all.” Lanskoy’s monument was located near the pyramid tomb for Catherine’s greyhounds and various monuments to the Orlovs, Romanovs, and heroes of Chesme. That prompted Charles François Philibert Masson, author of Secret Memoirs of the court of Petersburg to write: “Are we from this to imagine that a dog, a lover, and a hero, are of equal importance in the eyes of an autocrat?”13
Back in Neuwied, David Roentgen was busy applying what he’d learned about Catherine’s taste and lifestyle. With her deep pockets, Catherine wooed the talented furniture maker away from other royal patrons, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Roentgen developed a special architectural style for Russia, distinguished by beautiful mahogany veneer and gilt bronze, precise and rigorous proportions and monumentality. Roentgen furniture continued to arrive in St. Petersburg, adding splendor to the Winter Palace and imperial summer residences. A shipment in March 1786 containing 126 items set back Russia’s treasury by 72,704 rubles. Among the pieces were three roll top desks, a desk with writing stand, a secretary, two clocks, and a pair of little tables.14
Catherine paid another 19,600 rubles for a large mahogany and oak desk she could use for writing while sitting or standing. Once again, Roentgen flattered his patroness, crowning the desk with a bronze allegorical group depicting Justice with Athena at her side, hanging a medallion struck with Catherine’s profile. On the pedestal, Time writes Catherine’s name in Latin, while History enters the empress’s deeds in a book. A Latin inscription on the lower step of the pedestal reads: “Offered and dedicated to the German muse in the year 1786 by the inventor Roentgen of Neuwied.” In 1787, Roentgen’s third shipment of furnishings arrived for Pella Palace.
With the “Catherine Effect” in high gear, Russian courtiers like Count Stroganov also ordered Roentgen furniture. By 1789, Catherine and her courtiers had bought hundreds of pieces of Roentgen cabinetry. Four of Roentgen’s five visits to Russia were connected to commissions for the empress. During one visit, Roentgen helped repair furniture at the Hermitage. Around the same time, another German cabinetmaker, Christian Meyer, was worked exclusively on orders for Catherine’s court. In addition to creating glass-fronted cabinets for the empress’s jewels and medium-size cabinets for her precious minerals, Meyer was also responsible for the woodwork in the Raphael Loggia. Catherine was so pleased, she hired Meyer to teach her grandchildren the art of carpentry.