Catherine continued to bring seemingly unlimited resources to her art collecting. In August 1785, she added the Breteuil collection of carved stones to her trove. “I came back to town yesterday,” she wrote Melchior Grimm, “. . . I pass by like a tomcat without anyone noticing . . . meanwhile your very humble servant strolls around the Hermitage, looks at pictures, plays with her monkey, looks at her doves, her parrots, her blue, red and yellow birds from America, and lets everyone say what they like as they do in Moscow.”1
That year, she offered British portrait miniaturist Richard Cosway 10,000 pounds for four tapestries, part of the twelve-work series Fructus Belli (The Fruits of War) commissioned by Mantua’s Ferrante Gonzaga. With its brutal images of military conflicts, the Brussels tapestries had inspired reflection on the use of weapons and the bitter hardships of war. Rejecting Catherine’s offer, Cosway gave them instead to Louis XVI the next year in return for four Gobelins Don Quixote tapestries.
Catherine’s interest in British culture led her to collect English paintings. In 1774, when Joseph Wright of Derby was a virtual unknown in his own country, she acquired The Iron Forge Viewed from Without, a night scene of a forge lit with a glowing orange light. Exhibited in 1773 at the London Society of Artists, the picture was bought for Catherine by her consul Alexander Baxter. Five years later, Catherine added two more dramatic Wrights inspired by his trip to Italy: A Firework Display at the Castel Sant’ Angelo and Vesuvius Erupting.
Princess Dashkova introduced Catherine to the work of Angelica Kauffmann, Europe’s most famous woman painter, with a portrait of a Greek beauty in honor of Russia’s victory of the Turks (now lost). Like Mengs, Kauffmann was a child prodigy with an artist father. In 1763, the 22-year-old got a career break when she met and painted scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Rome (Winckelmann’s influential career ended five years later with his murder in Trieste). For fifteen years, from 1766 to 1781, Angelica Kauffmann enjoyed great success in London. Along with still life artist Mary Moser, Kauffmann became one of two women founding members of the Royal Academy (it would take another two centuries before another woman was named an Academician). Starting with her history paintings for the Academy’s first show in 1769, Kauffmann exhibited regularly. To broaden her reach, she mastered etching and engraving.
After marrying her second husband, Venetian view painter Antonio Zucchi in 1781, Kauffmann returned to Venice. Later that year, Kauffmann moved to Rome, leasing Anton Raphael Mengs’s former palazzo. Her salon became a gathering place for an international coterie of poets, artists, and scholars. The multilingual artist’s international clientele included Russian Prince Nikolai Yusupov and Stanislaus Poniatowski, King of Poland. Catherine too sought her works, writing Grimm, “this divine one who goes for walks in Castel Gandolfo and Frascati with Angelica Kauffmann, what would it cost him to say to this famous woman: My dear friend, if you have the time, take a brush and paint a lovely painting in your style for the Emp[ress] of R[ussia], who loves paintings.”2 Today, the Hermitage’s eleven Kauffmanns include a pair of tondos (circular paintings) commissioned by Catherine during the artist’s English period. The Monk of Calais and The Insane Maria (1780) were both based on episodes from Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Catherine seems to have also bought another of Kauffmann’s literary inspired tondos based on a scene from Alexander Pope’s “Abelard to Héloise.”
Thanks to Prince Nicolai Yusupov, who commissioned many works from Kauffmann, the artist immortalized Catherine’s new “tester” and lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova. In 1788, to help Kauffmann paint Portrait of Countess Anna Protasova and Her Nieces, Yusupov sent her six half-length images. In the group portrait, Protasova wears one of her royal gifts—a diamond-studded locket with a miniature portrait of the empress. The five young nieces depicted with her, daughters of her brother Lieutenant General Peter Protasov, lived with Protasova at the Winter Palace.
One of the best known British painters working for Catherine was Richard Brompton. A pupil of Mengs in Rome in the 1760s, he’d returned to London where he painted the Prince of Wales and his brother Prince Frederick. Brompton often exhibited his work at London’s Society of Artists, which elected him president in 1773. But by 1779, the irascible artist landed at the King’s Bench debtors’ prison. After securing Brompton’s release by paying his debts, Catherine summoned him to St. Petersburg the following year as court painter (the spot opened after Stefano Torelli’s death). English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who dubbed Potemkin “the prince of princes,” called Brompton “a harum-scarum ingeneous sort of painter.”3
That spring, before her departure to meet Joseph II in Mogilyov, Catherine commissioned Brompton to paint a portrait of Alexander. But the young grand duke could not sit still, requiring Brompton to commit his appearance to memory. The following year, with her Greek Project front and center, Catherine commissioned an unusual double portrait of her grandsons. Catherine dreamed of putting Alexander on the throne instead of her son Paul. She also envisioned a brilliant future for Constantine who’d rule the revived Byzantine Empire after she expelled the Turks from Constantinople. Brompton depicted Alexander cutting the Gordian knot like Alexander the Great while his younger brother bears the banner and cross of the Christian Emperor Constantine the Great. “Brompton, the English painter, is established here and has great talent,” Catherine wrote Grimm, “he is a student of Mengs, he has painted my two grandsons. . . . this picture looks no worse in my gallery beside the Van Dycks.”4 Catherine kept the “charming” double portrait in her apartments and sent a full-size copy to Grimm in Paris.
Brompton’s portraits of Catherine included a variation on an earlier half-length by Roslin, his own half-length portrait, and a full-length allegorical portrait with the Russian fleet in the background. For a portrait commissioned by Joseph II, Potemkin ordered changes to Catherine’s hair. Austria’s emperor complained this “daubing” was “so horribly painted that I wanted to send it back.” In Brompton’s original half-length likeness, he shows Catherine wearing an imperial crown and laurel wreath, with an ermine mantle, yellow and black ribbon of the Order of St. George, and the chain and star of the Order of St. Andrew the First Called. The formal portrait appears to be the model for an allegorical painting of the empress still on the easel when the 49-year-old artist died unexpectedly at Tsarskoe Selo in January 1783. To help settle Brompton’s 5,000-ruble debt, Potemkin paid his widow 1,000 rubles.5
In 1785, Lord Carysfort convinced Catherine and Potemkin that their art collections were lacking in British paintings, specifically works by celebrated Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of London’s Royal Academy. Catherine commissioned two history paintings from Reynolds—one for herself and the other for Potemkin. When Sir Joshua landed the prestigious Russian commission, he was putting the finishing touches on a portrait of George IV. Britain’s foremost portraitist, Reynolds’s glamorous clients included royals and celebrities. Despite this success, he yearned to be a history painter. Now, nearing the end of his career, he’d been given the chance to work in what he considered the most elevated, intellectually challenging of art genres.
Catherine left the subject of the paintings to Reynolds. Horace Walpole suggested the artist paint Peter the Great, who’d spent almost three months at the Deptford naval yard in 1697 learning shipbuilding. “What a fine contrast might have been drawn,” wrote Walpole, “as Peter threw off the imperial mantle, and prepared to put on trowzers, between the sullen indignation of his Russian attendants, and the joy of the English tars at seeing majesty adopt their garb! Peter learning navigation here in order to give a navy to his own country—how flattering to both nations!”6
Reynolds chose a very different subject for “a sovereign to whom all the Poets, Philosophes and Artists of the time have done homage.”7 In a February 1786, he wrote Charles 4th Duke of Rutland: “. . . I have received a Commission from the Empress of Russia to Paint an Historical Picture for her, the size, the subject, and everything else, left to me, and another on the same condition, for Prince Potemkin. The subject I have fixed on for the Empress is Hercules strangling the Serpents in the Cradle as described by Pindar of which there is a very good translation by Cowley.”8
As told by Greek poet in the Nemean Odes, baby Hercules, son of Alcmene and Zeus, became the object of the bitter jealousy of Zeus’s wife, Hera. The vengeful goddess sent two huge serpents to kill the infant and his brother. To everyone’s astonishment, the robust baby crushed the monsters from his cradle. Reynolds populated the canvas with several recognizable portraits. At the left, the blind soothsayer Tiresias bears a striking resemblance to writer Samuel Johnson. Hera, who watches her plan go wrong from the clouds above, strongly resembles Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons (who Reynolds had recently painted as the tragic muse). Reynolds was famous for obsessively reworking his paintings, but he spent more time on Infant Hercules than any other work. He’s also known to have reused paintings. About Catherine’s painting, the artist is reported to have said, “. . . there are several pictures under it, some better, some worse.”9
In 1788, Reynolds finished Potemkin’s The Continence of Scipio, a story taken from Livy’s History of Rome. Despite temptations of wine, women, and gold, Roman General Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, showed restraint by returning a captured Carthaginian maiden to her fiancé. For this virtuous gesture, Scipio came to represent mercy during warfare. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, the tale continued to be popular with painters like Poussin, Rubens, van Dyck, and Batoni. Reynolds’s action-packed version was an obvious nod to Potemkin, a military commander and hero of the Turkish-Russo War.
Along with Scipio, the artist sent Potemkin a second painting as a gift, the sensual Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus. Reynolds painted multiple versions of the picture—including one for Lord Carysfort and another owned by British architect Sir John Soane. While Venus hides her face from immodest glances with her arm, Cupid pulls at the blue silk ribbon around her waist and looks up at his mother to see her reaction. The model for Reynolds’s original painting is thought to have been the beautiful Emma Hart, future wife of Naples envoy Sir William Hamilton and mistress of Lord Nelson.
Before shipping Continence of Scipio and Infant Hercules to St. Petersburg, Reynolds exhibited the works at the Royal Academy. The St. James Chronicle observed that Scipio was overly busy but beautifully colored “equal to the finest works of the Flemish School . . . We also think the woman presented to Scipio too young. She represents beautiful infancy, not captivating youth.” A review in The Public Advertiser concluded: “. . . the canvas is perhaps too small for the design, and the figures are, consequently, thrown together too closely; but upon the whole it may be said that this picture is worthy of the pencil of the President of the Royal Academy; and that, however the invidious and spiteful may rail, it is such as will adorn the cabinet of some future connoisseur; although it should happen that envy and detraction should gain an ascendancy at the present.”10
Horace Walpole, never a fan of Reynolds or Catherine, also weighed in: “I called at Sir Joshua’s while he was at Amthill, and saw his Hercules for Russia. I did not at all admire it. . . . if Sir Joshua is satisfied with his own departed picture, it is more than the possessors of posterity will be . . . the passions of a nursery, and the common expression of affrighted parents . . . The parents would feel the same emotions if two large rats had got into the cradle.”11 Amthill Park’s owner Lady Ossory was also unimpressed: “I called at Sir Joshua’s . . . and saw his Hercules for Russia; I did not at all admire it: the principal babe put me in mind of . . . the monstrous craws . . . Blind Tiresias is staring with horror at the terrible spectacle.”12
After many delays, at year-end Catherine received The Infant Hercules Slaying Serpents along with copies of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, a series of lectures he’d delivered to the Royal Academy during the 1770s. In choosing Infant Hercules, a metaphor for the might of the young, powerful Russia, Reynolds had intended to flatter Catherine. But apparently she did not appreciate having her vast empire depicted as a baby. James Walker, Catherine’s British imperial engraver, witnessed the unveiling of the large canvas at the Winter Palace:
“. . . I am rather disposed to think it was not entirely pleasing to her Imperial majesty, who perhaps did not quite agree with the painter, that her empire was in its leading-strings. . . . the picture was placed in the Hermitage for her Majesty’s inspection, and when she came with her courtiers, Doyen [French painter Gabriel Francois Doyen] and myself were present,” Walker recalled. “Her Majesty spoke to me of the great talents of Sir J.R., whom she admired not only as a painter, but as an author, and gave me a copy of his excellent discourses to the Royal Academy. . . .The picture was not so much admired as it ought to have been. The style was new to them and his mode of loaded colouring not understood; in short it was too voluptuous for their taste. . . . Doyen was asked his opinion, he added sarcastically ‘Turn it upside down, it’s still a nice painting.’ I could have strangled him. In short, turn it topsy-turvy, it is always a fine picture.”13
There was another problem. To achieve the depth of color of Renaissance painters like Titian and Tinteretto, Reynolds experimented widely with different materials. Unorthodox mixtures of gum varnish, wax, eggs, and Venice turpentine caused some of his colors to fade and his paint surfaces to flake and crack. Blistering and cracking also resulted when Reynolds applied color before allowing the white under-paint to dry. Infant Hercules is no longer displayed at the State Hermitage Museum; nearly the entire surface is covered with cracks, some almost a half an inch wide; its pigments have darkened and sunk into the canvas. In October 1899, Sir Lionel Cust, director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, wrote from St. Petersburg: “The countenance of Scipio is in very bad condition. In the catalogue it is stated to be unfinished, but I think that it only means that it has gone to pieces. There is a blue streak down the young woman’s face. Taken all in all, it is a great failure.”14
Catherine appears to have been more keen on Sir Joshua’s art theories than his paintings, as she made her displeasure of the Infant Hercules painting known by delaying payment of the 1,500-guinea invoice until 1794—two years after the artist’s death at age sixty-eight from chronic liver failure. The empress did send Reynolds a gold snuffbox with her portrait cameo surrounded by diamonds in 1790. Inside the jeweled box, he discovered her handwritten thank you note: “For the knight Reynolds in exchange for the pleasure I felt when I read your excellent speech on paintings.”15
The same year, a Russian translation of Sir Joshua’s Discourses appeared. Though there was no official reaction from Catherine on Infant Hercules, British engraver James Walker was clearly embarrassed by Gabriel François Doyen’s sarcasm. Ironically, it seems that Catherine and Horace Walpole may have been in agreement on the painting, one of the hallmark “misses” in her collection.