During Peter III’s doomed reign, he signed a hugely unpopular peace treaty with Prussia, which was one of the final straws that caused the nobility, army, and Church to desert him in favor of Catherine. When she became empress, Catherine didn’t renege on the disadvantageous agreement, but she soon exacted her revenge. In 1764, she snatched a paintings collection from under the nose of Frederick the Great. Best known for establishing Germany’s military culture, Frederick II first made headlines at age eighteen when he tried to escape his physically abusive father by fleeing to England with a childhood friend. Accused of treason and threatened with the death penalty by his father, Frederick was forced to watch his friend’s execution from his jail cell. Frederick’s trauma-filled childhood and adolescence produced a deceitful politician and mean-spirited adult. Maria Theresa called Frederick “the evil man” after he conquered Silesia and started the War of the Austrian Succession, one of three wars he waged during his forty-six-year rule. Two centuries later, Adolf Hitler admiringly described Frederick’s Prussia as “the germ cell of the Reich.”
To escape the stresses of the battlefield and distance himself from the court in Berlin, Frederick retreated each spring to the yellow hilltop palace in Potsdam he called Sanssouci, French for “without cares.” The King personally sketched plans for the palace, sending them from the battlefield to his team of architects. Joining Frederick for “table talks” to discuss art, literature, philosophy, and science were some of Europe’s greatest minds, including Voltaire, who stayed for three years and described Prussia’s leader as “a man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera.” After dinner, Frederick’s guests adjourned to the gold and white music room to listen to their royal host play the flute.
At age thirty-two, Frederick’s preoccupation with death led him to order a crypt on the upper terrace of Sanssouci’s vineyard beside that of his pet whippets (ignoring his uncle’s wishes, Frederick William II buried him in Potsdam’s Garrison Church; his remains were moved to Sanssouci in 1991). Initially, Frederick collected contemporary French paintings by Antoine Watteau, Francois Boucher, and Nicolas Lancret. But under the influence of his intellectual guests, Frederick’s taste shifted to Old Masters—primarily history paintings by baroque celebrities like Caravaggio, Rubens, and Rembrandt. In 1754, Frederick turned down ten Lancrets. Frederick saw himself as a connoisseur, paying large sums for paintings like Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas. Tellingly, Frederick did not hang any portraits of relatives at Sanssouci—not even of his beloved mother or sister. He banned women from his entourage, including his unloved wife, and surrounded himself with guards, secretaries, and army officers.
In 1755, just months before he started the Seven Years’ War, Frederick broke ground on his new picture gallery, a short distance from the palace. “I am building a picture gallery at Sanssouci, another silliness, if you like, but the world is like that, and if you wanted to record only the reasonable things which men do, history would be very short,” he wrote his sister.1 A central tribuna separated the long vaulted gallery into east and west wings. Only the most precious materials would do. As a stunning backdrop to his antique sculptures, Frederick imported a rare dark green stone extracted from Roman ruins in North Africa for the gallery walls. Beneath the gilded central dome was a striking diamond-shaped floor made of white Carrera marble and a yellow marble, giallo di Siena.
Frederick hung his gilt-framed canvases baroque style, with two to three rows of pictures filling the walls. Paintings were often grouped around contrasting themes—war and peace, youth and age, love and death, and various kinds of love: religious, sensual and maternal. Masters and pupils were also grouped—from Rubens and van Dyck to Rembrandt, Lievens, and Bols. Conspicuously absent were depictions of the martyrdom of saints, war scenes, and hunting scenes. “The collection, which the King had assembled rather haphazardly, with the assistance of agents and not too competent advisers, contained works of prestige, which princes everywhere liked to acquire: paintings with famous signatures, even though they were occasionally false,” writes Helmut Börsch-Supan.2
For many years, Frederick had been assisted with his collection by Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky—an ambitious Berlin merchant who’d made a fortune as a haberdasher, jeweler, and textile maker. Born in Poland in 1710 and orphaned at age five, Gotzkowsky became the largest employer in Berlin and personal confidant to Prussia’s young king. Frederick hired the skilled businessman to run a silk factory and turn the struggling Royal Porcelain Factory into a prestigious operation like Saxony’s Meissen. Through his contacts with agents, distributors, and foreign ambassadors, Gotzkowsky acquired artworks from Paris, Rome, Venice, and Amsterdam. Gotzkowsky’s own painting-filled home became a hub of Berlin society. Among his guests were Prussia’s Prince Henry along with British biographer James Boswell, who developed a crush on Gotzkowsky’s wife.
The Seven Years’ War slowed but didn’t stop Frederick’s art collecting. Four years into the conflict, Gotzkowsky assembled a cache of paintings for his royal patron—works by Correggio, Carlo Maratta, Titian, Giulio Romano, and Luca Giordano. By 1761, Frederick’s art-loving chamberlain, the Marquis d’Argens, called Sanssouci’s new picture gallery the most beautiful after Rome’s Saint Peter’s. Gotzkowsky proceeded to assemble another group of pictures for Frederick, mainly Dutch and Flemish. But his timing was bad. The crippling war—called “the first World War” by Winston Churchill—had cost half a million Prussian lives and left the country in ruins. After Frederick declined the paintings, Gotzkowsky found himself in the middle of a financial crisis. The businessman had speculated in the Russo-Prussian grain trade, entering into a risky deal to buy grain from the Russian army as it left Poland. With the price of the grain collapsing by over 75 percent and his Amsterdam bank going under, Gotzkowsky faced bankruptcy.
As a way out, the businessman approached Russia’s envoy in Berlin, Prince Vladimir Sergeyevich Dolgorukov, offering Frederick’s paintings as partial payment of his (221,000 thaler) debt to the Russians. Frederick got involved, using Gotzkowsky’s pictures to stabilize Prussia’s shaky relations with Russia, whose grain he needed to feed Pomerania and Poland. In the summer of 1763, after a great deal of diplomatic correspondence and finagling between Gotzkowsky, his debtors, and the foreign ministries of Berlin and St. Petersburg, Catherine green-lighted the deal. To settle his debt, Gotzkowsky agreed to send Catherine 225 pictures plus 90 unnamed paintings.
Catherine was delighted. In addition to showing up her political rival, she was able to contrast Russia’s healthy treasury with that of Prussia. There may have also been an element of personal satisfaction for the German-born empress. Frederick had played matchmaker in her miserable marriage, convincing Empress Elizabeth that she was the right choice for her nephew Peter. To enhance her family’s prestige, Frederick had even promoted Catherine’s uninspiring father, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, to field marshal. With the match, Frederick thought he had secured Prussia’s influence at the Russian court.
Frederick’s strategy completely backfired. Prussia’s king quickly learned not to underestimate Catherine. “Her spheres of activity encompass everything, no aspect of government escapes her,” he wrote about Catherine. “. . . She’s a living reproof to all those drowsy monarchs on their thrones who have no comprehension of the plans she is executing.”3 One of those plans was to gain Russian access to the Black Sea through Poland. While the ink was drying on the Berlin paintings deal, Frederick congratulated Catherine for the election results of the new Polish king.
The previously fall, Catherine exploited Augustus III’s death to extend Russia’s influence over Poland. After making peace with Frederick, Catherine convinced him to back the election of her former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, as Poland’s new king. The couple had met four years after Catherine’s affair with Sergei Saltykov, when the charming, well-traveled young Polish nobleman was appointed secretary to England’s ambassador to Russia. Their relationship produced a daughter, Anna, named for Empress Elizabeth’s older sister and Peter III’s mother. Peter, who knew of Catherine’s affairs, reportedly quipped: “God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies. I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to take responsibility for it.”4 He wouldn’t have to. After being snatched away at birth like her older brother Paul, the frail baby died at fifteen months. Neither Peter nor Poniatowski accompanied Catherine and Empress Elizabeth for Anna’s burial in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Catherine’s three-year romance with Stanislaus ended tearfully when it threatened to undermine her husband’s reputation.
In August 1764, while Poniatowski was “elected” unanimously and installed as Catherine’s “wax doll” in Poland, the Berlin paintings arrived at the Winter Palace. Though the quality was uneven and six canvases were wrongly attributed to Peter Paul Rubens, the crates contained works by important 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists. These included Cook in the Larder by Frans Snyder, Allegorical Family Portrait and Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well by Jacob Jordaens, Hendrik van Balen’s Venus and Cupid, Jan Steen’s Revelers, and Jan Cossiers’s Concert. With Old Man at a Casement, Catherine thought she’d snagged a Rembrandt. It wasn’t until well into the 19th century that the painting was reattributed to Govaert Flinck, Rembrandt’s talented pupil and chief rival. Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Pointing a Partridge delighted Russia’s dog-loving empress. In his prolific career, the Frenchman produced a number of this type of distinctive hunting dog picture, including many starring Louis XV’s kennel.
The gem of the Gotzkowsky pictures turned out to be Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Glove (c. 1640) by Frans Hals, an artist who today ranks with Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer in the pantheon of Dutch “Golden Age” masters. Along with Rembrandt, Hals is credited with reinventing portraiture, achieving lively, memorable depictions with broad brushstrokes and stark contours. “His paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that he seems to surpass nature herself with his brush,” wrote poet and fellow Haarlemer Theodorus Schrevlius. “This is seen in all his portraits, so numerous as to pass belief, which are colored in such a way that they seem to breathe and live.”5
When the three-quarter-length portrait arrived at the Winter Palace, it was listed in the inventory as “a good portrait of an officer . . . two hundred and fifty reichsthalers, with a seal [i.e. monogram—I.A.S], painted by master Frans Hals.”6 Most scholars date the picture to around 1640 when Hals’s palette became increasingly monochromatic. With light framing his face, the mustachioed young man looks directly at the viewer, his brown-gloved hand resting on his black doublet. To the right of the sitter’s head, Hals added his monogram “FH.”
The arrival of the Berlin pictures whetted Catherine’s appetite for a picture gallery to rival those of Frederick the Great and Saxony’s late Augustus II. As part of Peter the Great’s fixation with the West, he imported European art, mainly Dutch and Flemish. An avid sailor since his youth, Peter was especially fond of seascapes. He displayed his art at his Summer Palace and European-style Kunstkammer (the latter also featured curiosities, minerals, and spectacular Scythian gold objects). Elizabeth, a fashion and jewelry aficionada, made one large purchase of Western art—115 pictures for her new palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Paintings were hung like tapestries from floor to ceiling, separated from each other by narrow gilded frames. Rather than incorporate any of the Romanov’s art into her new picture gallery, Catherine started from scratch.
While the Gotzkowsky deal fell in her lap, Catherine’s subsequent buys would demonstrate a proactive, calculated strategy. Catherine was self-deprecating about her new hobby, downplaying her taste and knowledge. Perhaps to throw off competitors and appear non-threatening to her courtiers, Catherine declared herself a “glutton” for art, not a connoisseur. But as early as 1758 as Grand Duchess, she had hinted at her sophistication when describing nobleman Ivan Shuvalov’s new St. Petersburg palace “. . . furnished very opulently but tastelessly, there were many pictures, but most of them only copies.”7
As in other areas, Catherine was a quick study. She devoured art history titles, collected architectural drawings, and carefully learned everything she could about the European art market. Before long, the empress was counseling her advisers. “Read the descriptions of the paintings which the antique dealers are selling,” she told Melchior Grimm. “By constantly studying catalogues of the paintings which I purchase, I have learned to describe what I see.”8