Catherine the Great is still the presiding genius of the Hermitage. Most histories date the foundation of the museum to her acquisition of 317 Old Master paintings from the Berlin dealer Johann Gotzkowski in 1764. And, while her ‘gluttonous’ – to use her own word – purchase of 4,000 Old Master paintings has drawn visitors from all comers of the world to the Hermitage for over 200 years, there is almost no field of the fine or applied arts which is not represented in the museum collection by some extraordinary masterpiece that she acquired.

Catherine was not much interested in sculpture but she bought the only Michelangelo marble in the collection – the unfinished Crouching Boy – and commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Voltaire, which depicts the famous French philosopher in old age, life-size and seated in an armchair. The greatest sculptor of the eighteenth century has brilliantly conveyed the personality of the crusty old genius. It is also Catherine’s doing that the Hermitage has the best collection of French eighteenth-century bronzes outside France.

Engraved gems were probably her greatest love, a collecting field to which little attention is now paid. In antiquity, precious and semiprecious stones were often carved in relief or engraved, most often with portraits but also with emblems and little pictures commemorating special events. Some were made as personal ornaments, some as amulets or charms and some as seals. They were rediscovered in the Renaissance and new gems began to be carved. Catherine, who was fascinated by history, loved the historical references she found in these little carvings. She collected Greek and Roman examples, as well as Renaissance pieces and brand new commemorative items – many of which were carved at her court. She was probably the greatest gem collector the world has ever known.

Catherine also bought Classical sculpture and set the scene for Russia’s great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century by annexing the Crimea in 1783 and territory north of the Black Sea which had previously belonged to the Turks. The ancient tombs of the Crimea did not begin to yield their treasures until the early years of the nineteenth century, but General A. Melgunov, a local military governor, had a barrow of the late seventh or early sixth century BC – the Litoi or Melgunov Barrow – near modern-day Kirovograd (formerly Elizavetgrad), opened in 1763, and donated its contents to Catherine. They included part of an iron sword with a finely wrought gold sheath and the gold lion-headed arms of a throne, and are among the earliest in date of the museum’s Scythian treasures.

In the field of the applied arts Catherine commissioned silver, jewels, porcelain, furniture, tapestries and other artefacts from the leading craftsmen of the day – dinner services from Sèvres and Wedgwood, tapestries from the Gobelins factory in France, furniture from David Roentgen in Germany (Marie Antoinette’s favourite cabinetmaker) and silver from Roettiers in Paris. She also patronised her own Imperial Porcelain Factory, and the local goldsmiths and cabinetmakers of St Petersburg. The scale of her commissions was always grandiose. Faced with furnishing the Winter Palace at the outset of her husband’s reign, for example, she ordered from Paris ‘eighty-five giltwood mirrors and sixty-seven carved and gilded sidetables with marble tops’. When planning a surprise gift for her lover Grigory Orlov in 1765, she ordered a 300-piece breakfast service from the Imperial Porcelain Factory decorated with scenes from his military career.

While the Russian imperial family produced many big spenders, Catherine was probably the biggest – but her spending was driven by political calculation. She realised early on that the splendour of her court would enhance her reputation in Europe and have a direct impact on diplomatic relations. It was no coincidence that the paintings she acquired from Gotzkowski in 1764 had been accumulated by the dealer on the instructions of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who could not afford to buy them after his financially crippling Seven Years War with Austria, Russia and France. Her husband, Peter III, made a highly disadvantageous, unilateral peace with Frederick, his hero, which Catherine did not renege on – but she got her own back by acquiring Frederick’s pictures. Gotzkowski had made an unhappy speculation and Catherine took the paintings against his outstanding debt. The spectacular bulk purchase was a way of demonstrating her superiority in a manner that all Europe would understand.

Catherine continued this strategy of lavish artistic patronage throughout her thirty-four-year reign, making St Petersburg a financial honeypot that attracted artists, designers and art dealers from all over Europe. Nowhere else was so much money being lavished on the arts. St Petersburg in the second half of the eighteenth century played a role similar to that of New York in the second half of the twentieth.

In a letter she wrote to her agent and friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm in 1790, six years before her death, Catherine was able to congratulate herself on having a collection that outclassed those of all the other monarchs of her day. ‘Besides the paintings and the Raphael Loggia,’ she wrote, referring to her 4,000 Old Masters and the copies she had commissioned of frescoes Raphael painted for the Vatican Palace in Rome, ‘my museum in the Hermitage contains 38,000 books; there are four rooms filled with books and prints, 10,000 engraved gems, roughly 10,000 drawings and a natural history collection that fills two large galleries.’ She forgot to mention her collection of roughly 16,000 coins and medals.

However, it was not as an art collector and patron that Catherine earned the historical privilege of having ‘Great’ tacked on to her name. Through well-calculated alliance and war she significantly extended Russia’s frontiers to the west and south. In a series of three annexations she gobbled up most of Poland and, fighting the Turks in the south, she acquired rich new farmlands, the strategic northern coast of the Black Sea and a bite of the Caucasus. At home she tackled a thoroughgoing reform of Russia’s antiquated legal system and looked long and hard at the possibility of turning Russia into a constitutional monarchy – like Britain – but finally opted for autocracy. She was a stateswoman of no mean order.

Not unnaturally, Catherine fascinated her generation and many different accounts of her appearance and character survive. According to Austria’s ambassador, the Prince de Ligne, she was:

Other observers took a more jaundiced view. In 1772 the British ambassador Robert Gunning wrote that ‘the Empress, whatever may have been reported, is by no means popular here, it is not indeed in this country that she aims at becoming so. She neither bears any affection to the People of it, nor has she acquired theirs. The Principle which in her supplies the want of these motives to great undertakings is an unbounded desire of Fame.’ The creation of the Hermitage Museum is, perhaps, one of the happiest results of Catherine’s ‘unbounded desire of Fame’.

The first indications of this governing ‘Principle’ can be read in her childhood. On a visit to her relations in Brunswick, a canon who practised palmistry asserted that he saw three crowns in her palm. She interpreted this reading as a sign that she was to marry Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp, heir to the Russian throne. ‘Child that I was,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘the title of queen delighted me. From then on my companions teased me about him and little by little I became used to thinking of myself as destined for him.’ Catherine first met Peter when she was ten, became affianced to him at fourteen and was married at fifteen.

Born on 29 April 1729, she was the daughter of Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, a major-general in the Prussian army, and was baptised Sophia Frederika Augusta according to the Lutheran rite – she took the name Catherine when she converted to the Russian Orthodox religion before her marriage. It was her mother’s connections that rendered ‘Sophia’ a suitable bride for her cousin Karl Peter Ulrich, the nephew of the childless Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Catherine’s mother, Johanna, had been born a Holstein-Gottorp and one of her brothers was King of Sweden. Another had been engaged to marry Elizabeth but died before the wedding could take place and the Empress remembered him with nostalgia.

Catherine was brought up at Stettin, a Baltic port where her father was Governor. The most important influence on her childhood was a French governess, Elisabeth Cardel, who made her read Corneille, Racine and Molière, and taught her to love the speed and wit of the French language. This Francophile orientation later became the keynote of her court, and the Hermitage Museum has the best collection of French painting outside France. Catherine recognised her debt to her governess even in old age, proudly describing herself in a letter to Voltaire as the ‘pupil of Mile Cardel’.

After her marriage to Peter in 1744, she spent seventeen years at the court of the Empress Elizabeth. The Grand Duke Peter was sickly and mentally retarded, with a passion for all things German, especially military parades. He idolised Frederick the Great of Prussia on account of his prowess as a military commander and the discipline of his troops. Peter loved dressing up in Prussian uniform and drilling his footmen and servants. Contemporary accounts suggest that he may also have been sterile, in which case the future Tsar Paul I was the son of a handsome courtier called Sergey Saltykov with whom Catherine says she fell in love in 1752 – according to the Memoirs which she wrote in old age, describing her life up to the beginning of her reign as empress.

Catherine’s son Paul was born on 20 September 1754. The Empress Elizabeth was present at the birth and immediately took the child back to her own rooms. ‘I did not see a living soul for the rest of the day,’ wrote Catherine, ‘nor did anyone send to enquire about me. The Grand Duke was drinking with anyone he could find and the Empress was busy with the child.’ To comfort herself, she turned to her books, and devoured Tacitus’ Annals, Voltaire’s Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, she tells us. After she recovered, she hardly saw her son, who was effectively adopted by Elizabeth. Saltykov also abandoned her. Catherine’s daughter Anna, born three years later in 1757, was probably fathered by Count Stanisław Poniatowski, the future King of Poland. Elizabeth removed and adopted this second child as she had done the first.

While they started out as friends, Peter and Catherine grew rapidly apart. Unlike her husband, Catherine groomed herself to rule. She learned Russian, studied Russian history and went out of her way to demonstrate her devotion to the Orthodox Church. While she had a succession of lovers, the mainstay of her life was study. According to the Chevalier d’Eon, a French diplomat, writing at the time of her accession:

The Empress has a great love of reading. And the greater part of her time since her marriage has been spent devouring those modern French and English authors who have written the most influential works on ethics, the natural sciences and religion. It is enough for a book to be condemned in France for her to give it her full approbation. She is never without the works of Voltaire, the De l’esprit of Helveticus, the writings of the Encyclopedistes and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She is, in fact, a natural bluestocking.

The famous French philosophes – Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau – were keen advocates of political reform which would give ordinary citizens rights in the running of their countries, for which they were from time to time imprisoned or exiled. It was no doubt their political ideas that first caught Catherine’s imagination but, after her accession, their friendship helped stimulate and instruct her taste for art. Her Memoirs do not reveal that she had any interest in collecting art before 1762, but within a year of her accession she was corresponding with Voltaire, and Diderot became her chief buying agent in Paris.

By the time of the Empress Elizabeth’s death in December 1761, Peter’s feelings for Catherine had shifted from unromantic friendship to acute dislike. He had fallen in love with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizaveta Vorontsova, the daughter of Elizabeth’s vice-chancellor, who tried to persuade him that he should announce little Paul’s illegitimacy, divorce Catherine and marry her instead. Well aware of this danger, Catherine retired to the seaside pavilion of Mon Plaisir at Peterhof where she began to plot a coup d’etat with her new lover, Count Grigory Orlov, a handsome officer in the palace guards, his four brothers and a few close friends in the army.

All was well prepared and on 29 June 1762 Catherine was fetched before dawn by Grigory’s brother Alexey Orlov and driven to St Petersburg where the Ismailovsky Guards proclaimed her their matushka – which is usually translated ‘little mother’ but in Russian implies the respect and reverence that a devoted son feels for his mother, who has the right to command him as she sees fit. They marched triumphantly through the city, with other regiments joining them, and at the Kazan Cathedral the Archbishop of Novgorod received Catherine as sovereign and gave her his blessing. She went on to the Winter Palace where, pausing to collect her eight-year-old son to provide added legitimacy, she made her first public appearance on a balcony overlooking the pillared entrance on Palace Square. Six regiments were gathered below, with their artillery, while priests passed among them distributing blessings. The army and the church had endorsed Catherine’s accession.

Meanwhile, a manifesto, hastily printed the night before, was distributed in the streets of the capital. In it Catherine explained that Peter’s disdain for the church and his alliance with Prussia, ‘our mortal enemy’, had made her move necessary. ‘For these reasons we have felt ourselves obliged, with God’s help, and on the clear and sincere wishes of our subjects, to take the throne as sole and absolute sovereign.’

Only a week later a crumpled note was brought to her from Alexey Orlov stating that over supper with the Emperor an argument had arisen and he ‘was no more’. ‘We cannot even remember what we did, but every one of us down to the last man is entirely guilty,’ wrote Alexey. Catherine is said to have fallen into a faint, horrified by the idea that her husband had been assassinated by her friends. However, she recovered quickly enough to issue a manifesto the next day covering up what had happened: ‘On the seventh day of our accession to the throne of Russia, we have been advised that the ex-tsar Peter III suffered another of his habitual haemorrhoidal attacks, together with a violent colic. Aware of our duty as a Christian, we immediately gave the order to supply him with all necessary care. But to our great sadness we received, last night, the news that God’s will had put an end to his life.’

Only nine days after her coup d’etat she wrote to Denis Diderot offering to continue printing his famous Encyclopedie in Russia – its publication had just been banned in France. The Encyclopedie was one of the great intellectual achievements of the eighteenth century, the first of the multi-volume encyclopaedias which have continued to be compiled and published in almost every country up to the present day. It was edited by Diderot with the help of the mathematician Jean d’Alembert, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau among its many distinguished contributors. Diderot turned Catherine down on this occasion, preferring to publish in Switzerland.

Next she tried inviting d’Alembert to Russia as tutor to her son Paul – she offered him a salary of 20,000 roubles, a palace and the rank of ambassador. However, d’Alembert also refused. Foreigners were initially nervous of associating with a regicide. Referring to Catherine’s manifesto on Peter Ill’s death, d’Alembert explained to Voltaire why he turned down her offer: ‘I am also prone to Haemorrhoids; they take too serious a form in that country and I want to have a painful bottom in safety.’

Catherine had better luck with Voltaire himself. Having just completed a two-volume History of Russia, a paean of praise to Peter the Great, he was intrigued by a sovereign who positively wanted to help publish the Encyclopedie. He wrote a poem dedicated to Catherine who was overwhelmed with delight when she received it. Her reply, dated 15 October 1763, tells him:

I was so eager to read your ode that I have abandoned a heap of petitions, and many people’s fortunes have been set aside. I am not even sorry…. I must assure you that since 1746 I have felt the greatest obligation towards you. Before that time I read only novels; then by chance your works came into my hands; since then I have never stopped reading them, and would not have wished for books better written, or where there was as much to learn.

It was the beginning of a correspondence that lasted until Voltaire’s death in 1778. After his death Catherine paid his heirs 135,398 livres for his library – 7,000 volumes bound in red morocco and annotated by the sage himself, together with most of his papers and her own letters to him. They remained at the Hermitage until the mid-nineteenth century when they were transferred to the Public Library on Nevsky Prospect. She even considered building a replica of Voltaire’s chateau at Ferney, on the French-Swiss frontier, in the park at Tsarskoe Selo as a memorial. She had careful scale drawings and a model made for her but the idea came to nothing. The Hermitage still has the model.

While Voltaire offered his friendship – in fulsome verse – Diderot had to be bought. In 1766 Catherine heard from her ambassador in Paris, Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, that Diderot’s financial affairs were in such disorder that he was forced to offer his library for sale for 15,000 livres. She offered 16,000 on condition that the books remained in Diderot’s home in Paris and he acted as her librarian during his lifetime – with a salary of 1,000 livres a year to be paid for fifty years in advance, in other words a further lump sum of 50,000 livres. Diderot was overcome with gratitude. ‘Great Princess,’ he wrote, ‘I bow down at your feet; I stretch my arms towards you but my mind has contracted, my brain is confused, my ideas jumbled, I am as emotional as a child, and the true expression of the feeling with which I am filled dies on my lips…. Oh Catherine! Remain sure that you rule as powerfully in Paris as you do in St Petersburg.’

In Diderot Catherine had acquired not only a counsellor and friend but also a well-connected artistic adviser with impeccable taste. For the next eight years, the most active of Catherine’s collecting career, Diderot busied himself finding great paintings and securing them on Catherine’s behalf.

Her first major acquisition had, however, been made two years earlier when she bought the collection of 317 Old Master paintings from the Berlin dealer, Johann Gotzkowski, which had been intended for Frederick the Great of Prussia. The most cultivated monarch of his age, and another of Voltaire’s correspondents, Frederick had filled his palace, Sans Souci, near Berlin with paintings by modern masters – Watteau, Boucher, Lancret, Chardin and others. He then decided that he wanted a group of Old Masters and in 1755 commissioned Gotzkowski to buy them for him. The dealer combed Europe for the finest Italian, Dutch and Flemish paintings money could buy and Frederick purchased a few works in 1756. However, the outbreak of the Seven Years War with Austria, France and Russia turned his mind to more urgent problems – in 1760 the Austrian and Russian armies briefly occupied Berlin – and he refused to buy the rest.

As a result, Gotzkowski found himself in financial difficulties. He managed to exacerbate them by the speculative purchase of Russian grain left behind in Prussia by the Russian army in 1762. On the verge of bankruptcy, he turned to the Russian ambassador, Vladimir Dolgoruky, and asked if Catherine would take the paintings in discharge of his debts. She decided to accept the offer and the Hermitage collection was born with a flourish. She acquired three Rembrandts, The Incredulity of St Thomas, Potiphar’s Wife and a Portrait of a Turk. There was a handsome Frans Hals Portrait of a Man with a Glove, and notable examples of Dutch genre painting, such as Jan Steen’s Revellers and Bartholomew van der Helst’s Market in Amsterdam.

Catherine was quick to follow up on her first collecting initiative. Paris was the centre of the art market at the time and she was lucky in having Prince Dmitry Golitsyn as her ambassador in France. He had been brought up there, knew Diderot, attended the famous salon of Madame Geoffrin and was very much at home in the intellectual circle that had long fascinated Catherine. He bought her the works of contemporary painters such as Greuze and Chardin, and a miscellany of Old Masters, but his greatest coup was the 1766 purchase of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son from a certain M. d’Amezun for 5,400 livres. The painting, with its extraordinary psychological sensitivity, is regarded by some as the greatest work of art in the Hermitage.

It was also in 1766 that Golitsyn helped introduce Catherine to her two most influential artistic advisers, Denis Diderot and Étienne-Maurice Falconet. He had alerted Catherine when Diderot put his library up for sale and handled the negotiations over its purchase. Later in the year she asked Golitsyn to find her a sculptor capable of creating a fitting monument to her predecessor Peter the Great. Catherine regarded herself as Peter’s political heir – he had begun to open Russia to Europe and the modern world, a task which she saw herself completing. She pointed this out with a pretty play on words in a Latin inscription she placed on the sculpture’s pedestal once it was completed: Petro Primo Catharina Secunda (‘To Peter the First from Catherine the Second’).

Golitsyn tried out a succession of fashionable sculptors but they quoted exorbitant prices – Guillaume Coustou 450,000 livres, Louis-Claude Vassé 400,000 livres and Augustin Pajou 600,000 livres. Then Diderot took a hand and asked Falconet, who had written an article on sculpture for his Encyclopedie, for a quotation. Falconet had been working at the Sèvres factory for the previous nine years, modelling small classical figures that could be reproduced in porcelain and was enthusiastic at the idea of working on a monumental scale. He said he would execute the statue for a salary of 25,000 livres a year and was prepared to devote eight years to it, thus undercutting his colleagues and securing the commission. In fact, the Bronze Horseman which dominates the banks of the Neva in front of St Isaac’s Cathedral – and has become a popular venue for newlyweds to get themselves photographed – took Falconet twelve years to complete, a period during which he acted as a crucial link between Catherine and her artistic advisers in Paris, counselled her on the quality of the pictures she was buying and helped to hang them in her new galleries.

By 1782, when his bronze was finally completed after three attempts at casting the vast sculpture, Falconet had fallen out with Catherine and he returned to France without her even bidding him goodbye. She was the first to honour his monument, however, stifling local criticism of Peter being depicted – three times life size – wearing only a Roman toga. She went to fantastic lengths to obtain a pedestal that would suitably support his rearing horse, a vast lump of granite shaped like a wave about to break, 22 feet high, 42 feet long and 34 feet wide, which she had seen on a visit to Finland in 1768. She offered a reward of 7,000 roubles to the person who devised the best way of moving it to St Petersburg and it ended up being rolled on brass balls with one hundred horses pulling it. The journey lasted a year on a road built specially for the purpose.

In terms of enhancing Catherine’s fame, the whole enterprise was an outstanding success. The sculpture, Falconet’s masterpiece, has been hailed as one of the most imposing of all equestrian statues. Furthermore, it inspired Pushkin in 1833–4 to write his poem The Bronze Horseman, thus earning the statue a significant place in literature as well as art history.

One of the first picture purchases engineered by the Falconet–Diderot team was from the Gaignat collection. When Louis XV’s secretary Louis Jean Gaignat died in 1768, Diderot immediately wrote to Falconet urging him to alert Catherine, since Gaignat, he said, ‘had collected some wonderful works of literature almost without knowing how to read, and some wonderful works of art without being able to see any more in them than a blind man’. In the event there was fierce competition and Diderot only managed to buy Catherine three canvases by Gerard Dou, and one each by Bartolomé Murillo and Jean-Baptiste van Loo.

Falconet and Catherine exchanged views on the paintings, once they arrived in St Petersburg, by letter. ‘What a charming picture,’ Falconet wrote of the van Loo Galatea, ‘What magnificent brushwork! What beautiful tones! What a sweet little head of Aphrodite! What an admirable consistency! As for the Murillo we should fall on our knees before it. Anyone who dares to think otherwise has neither faith nor morals. The three pictures by Gerard Dou are all jewels, notwithstanding the wretched dry drawing and the colour of the flesh’ – they depicted bathers – ‘After all, I do know something about it. It is practically my profession.’ He was referring to his expertise in depicting the human form. Catherine replied: ‘I think you are right. It is only the van Loo I cannot approve and I am well aware of the reason; it is because I don’t understand enough to see in it all that you do.’ What humility on the part of an empress!

Golitsyn, meanwhile, had been transferred from Paris to The Hague and in 1768 secured two small but significant collections of Dutch and Flemish paintings, those of Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne and Johann-Philipp, Count Cobenzl, the Austrian emperor’s minister at the Belgian court. The purchase of the Cobenzl collection was particularly important in that it also contained Old Master drawings – some 4,000 of them were thrown in on the deal, thus founding the Hermitage collection. Cobenzl’s taste appears to have been erratic. There were twenty-five Rubens drawings and some splendid Van Dycks, as well as a quantity of drawings with very ambitious attributions which turned out to be wrong. Catherine does not appear to have been much interested in drawings but bought them along with collections of paintings, when necessary, on an imperial scale.

Three years later Golitsyn prepared a ‘peaceful triumph’ for Catherine – then engaged in war with Turkey – by purchasing the best paintings from the collection of Gerrit Braamcamp at an auction in Amsterdam, including works by Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch, Adriaen van Ostade, Steen, Esaias van de Velde and Gabriel Metsu. He sent them by sea to St Petersburg but unfortunately the captain was a man of exceptional piety. While navigating tricky waters in the Baltic he joined the ship’s company at prayers, leaving a junior in charge of the sounding line. The ship ran aground and all the pictures were lost. Catherine took it stoically. ‘I only lost 60,000 chervontsy,’ she wrote to Voltaire. ‘I shall have to get by without them. This year I have had several successes in such cases; what can I do?’

She had one of her biggest successes in 1769 when she acquired the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl who had been chancellor to Augustus III of Saxony. Anxious that his collection should keep up with that of his royal master, Brühl had used both treasury money and the king’s agents to make his purchases. When he died in 1763, his property was sequestered on account of his huge debts and it was not until 1768 that his heirs were given the right to sell. Catherine was alerted by her ambassador in Saxony, A. N. Beloselsky, and pronounced herself ready to buy the paintings as long as they were really by the artists to whom they had been attributed.

They were. She got four paintings by Rembrandt and five by Rubens – including a dazzling Landscape with a Rainbow – four great Jacob van Ruisdael landscapes, five van Ostades, a charming Terborch interior called The Letter, and twenty-one paintings by Philips Wouwermans. Besides Old Masters, there were contemporary works, including Watteau’s An Embarrassing Proposal and a fine group of Dresden views by Bernardo Bellotto which Catherine admired so much that she invited the artist to St Petersburg. Maybe the Venetian Bellotto felt it was too far north; after hesitating for a while, he turned Catherine down in favour of her former lover Stanislaw II of Poland and went to work in Warsaw.

The Brühl collection cost Catherine 180,000 Dutch guilders and arrived by boat from Hamburg slightly the worse for seawater – over 600 paintings and 1,076 drawings carefully mounted in fourteen leatherbound albums. Unlike Cobenzl, Brühl had impeccable taste in drawings. He focused primarily on the seventeenth century, buying Dutch, Italian and French masters. He had a large group of Poussins, many Rembrandts and other important Dutch masters, and works by Paolo Veronese and Titian. He also had a large number of engravings, which became the core collection of the Hermitage – there were albums devoted to Raphael, Titian, the Carracci and all the major artists admired in his day, a mix of original prints and reproductive engravings.

Catherine’s next sensational acquisition was the collection of the French banker Pierre Crozat, the most important private collection formed in France in the early eighteenth century. Pierre and his brother Antoine grew up in Toulouse and moved to Paris around 1700. Antoine was known as ‘le riche’ – his house on the Place Vendome is now the Ritz – while Pierre was ‘le pauvre’ despite his chateau at Montmorency and Paris home on the Rue Richelieu. The latter became the centre of artistic and intellectual life in the capital. Pierre was a bachelor and allowed several artists to live in his home for extended periods, including Watteau and Rosalba Camera.

Crozat died in 1740 but his paintings only came on the market in 1770, following the death of his nephew Baron Thiers, who had extended the collection with a few choice acquisitions of his own. These included Rembrandt’s Danae, probably the most admired painting in the Hermitage until an unbalanced Lithuanian stabbed the painting twice and threw acid at it in 1985. It has been carefully restored but the acid removed the fine glazes; much of the detail has disappeared, leaving unfinished areas of underpaint open to view.

When Diderot heard of the forthcoming sale he ‘exploded like a volcano’, as he later commented, and gathering up his collector friend François Tronchin, a Geneva banker, dramatist and art lover, set him to work on preparing a catalogue for Catherine. Tronchin rejected 158 paintings as unworthy of her and she ended up buying 500 paintings for 460,000 livres. As a thank-you present she sent Tronchin a sack of sable skins with which to make a fur coat. The paintings arrived at St Petersburg in June 1772 aboard a ship called The Swallow and Catherine found herself the mistress of eight more paintings by Rembrandt, six by Van Dyck, including a Self-portrait, some outstanding Rubens oil sketches and three finished paintings, a Raphael Holy Family, Giorgione’s Judith – a powerful, female study by one of the rarest masters of the Renaissance – and Veronese’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ.

There was an outcry over the sale in France, which Diderot described in a letter to Falconet: ‘I arouse the most genuine public hatred, and do you know why? Because I am sending you paintings. Art lovers cry out, artists cry out, the rich cry out…. The Empress plans to acquire the Thiers collection in the midst of a ruinous war: that is what humiliates and embarrasses them.’ The contract of sale was signed on 4 January 1772, at a time when Catherine was precariously negotiating the partition of Poland with Austria and Prussia as the price of peace on her western flank, while still fighting the Turks in the south.

Catherine also, of course, acquired paintings in ones and twos, sometimes taking advantage of a lucky chance, as in the case of two canvases that Diderot bought for her. The steward of the Marquis de Conflans lived in the apartment above Diderot’s in Paris. When the Marquis lost vast sums at cards and ordered his steward to sell two paintings he had no use for, Diderot secured them. They cost 1,000 écus the pair and turned out to be by Poussin.

An even more exotic stroke of fate put a Perseus and Andromeda by Anton Raffael Mengs in Catherine’s possession. It had been commissioned in Rome by a rich English baronet, Sir William Watkin, and was much admired when it was displayed to the public in Mengs’ studio. It was shipped to England from Livorno but captured off the French coast by pirates and subsequently confiscated by the French government.

Catherine’s agent, Melchior Grimm, managed to acquire it for Catherine through the French minister for foreign affairs, though the Empress had some qualms over the deal. ‘I see that you and M. de Vergennes, in order to give me pleasure, are doing down an honest English gentleman,’ she wrote to Grimm. ‘I have a slight conscience over it. If the good Englishman asks me, I will give him back his painting.’ Apparently, he never asked for it, though it is recorded that his son saw the picture in St Petersburg in 1792. In his A Tour of Russia, Siberia, and the Crimea, John Parkinson described visiting Catherine’s galleries in the 1790s with his friends: ‘Sir Watkin recognised here the Perseus and Andromeda by Mengs,’ he wrote, ‘which having been ordered by his father at Rome, was taken on its way to England by a Spanish vessel and sold to the Empress.’

By 1773 Catherine’s first enthusiasm for collecting paintings was on the wane. The period 1772–4 saw a watershed in her life on many fronts and may have reoriented her priorities. Grigory Orlov, her lover en titre for the last thirteen years, became so brazen in his infidelities that he was dismissed in 1772 and replaced, in December 1773, by Grigory Potemkin – Catherine had toyed with a twenty-eight-year-old ensign in the Horse Guards for a few months in between. It was also over these years that her first military campaigns were successfully concluded by the 1772 partition of Poland and the 1774 peace treaty with Turkey. The only major rebellion of her reign erupted in 1773; led by a Cossack called Emelyan Pugachev, who claimed to be her murdered husband Peter III, but was successfully repressed the following year.

It was in 1773 that Catherine ordered the Green Frog Service from Josiah Wedgwood’s factory at Burslem in Staffordshire, the largest and most important service this famous factory ever produced. Each piece is decorated with a different view, faithfully recording castles, abbeys, stately homes, gardens, towns and landscapes throughout Britain. It was intended to serve fifty people and 1,222 different views were painted on the creamware pieces in grisaille. A green frog was added to each since the service was intended for the Kekerekeksinen or ‘Frog Marsh’, Palace (later known as the Chesma Palace). This was typical of the scale on which Catherine issued her commissions.

In 1777 she ordered the so-called Cameo Service from Sèvres, a porcelain dinner and dessert service for sixty people including silver-gilt cutlery. Incorporating an antique cameo design, on a turquoise blue ground, it was the factory’s first fully Neoclassical design and one of the most expensive services ever made there. Catherine confided to Grimm that it was intended for Potemkin ‘and so that they will make it more beautiful, I have told them it is for me’.

It was also in 1773 that Diderot gave way to Friedrich Melchior Grimm as Catherine’s chief agent in Paris, both having visited St Petersburg in person that year. It was a struggle for the ageing Diderot to manage the long journey from Paris to St Petersburg. Although he was well received and spent many hours talking to Catherine, he was disappointed at her lack of interest in his advice. ‘Monsieur Diderot,’ she told him, ‘I have listened with great pleasure to the outpourings of your brilliant mind; your great principles, which I understand perfectly well, make fine theory but hopeless practice.’ She sped him on his way with the gift of a ring, a fur, his own carriage and three bags of a thousand roubles. ‘But,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘if I deduct from that the price of an enamel plaque and two paintings which I am giving to the Empress, the expenses of the journey and the presents I must give … we will only be left with five or six thousand francs, perhaps even less.’

Grimm was in St Petersburg at the same time, having come for the wedding of Catherine’s son Paul to a German princess. Friedrich Melchior Grimm was a well-born German courtier who arrived in Paris in 1748 escorting a young member of the Schoenberg family, then worked for the Prince of Saxe-Gotha and the Due d’Orléans. He became a close friend of Diderot and joined the circle of the philosophes. This enabled him to launch a fortnightly newsletter, his Correspondances littéraires, aimed at keeping the crowned heads of Europe up to date with the latest thinking in Paris. Catherine had long been among his subscribers. He was more of a gossip than a philosopher and their racy correspondence indicates how well the two got on. Grimm performed a wide range of services for Catherine, from buying cosmetics to dealing unofficially with the French government – and collecting art.

It was a sign of her waning enthusiasm for pictures that he could not interest her in the sale of the Jean-Pierre Mariette collection in 1775. Mariette came from a long line of engravers, was a patron of Watteau and had a collection whose fame was second only to that of Crozat. It was not until 1779 that Catherine made another major paintings purchase when she bought the pictures amassed by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, for his gallery at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Her motive, in this case, seems to have been strictly political.

Britain was then at the zenith of its power with an empire stretching from India to North America. The French philosophes, moreover, had hailed its political structure as the ideal for a modern country. In the words of Voltaire, Britain was a place ‘where the Prince is all powerful to do good and, at the same time is restrained from committing evil … and where the people share in the Government without confusion’. Catherine had admired Britain since the days of the Empress Elizabeth, when she had been a close friend of the British ambassador. By buying the ex-prime minister’s pictures she was demonstrating that the Russian Empire could upstage the British….

The Walpole scholar, Robert Ketton-Cremer, has described Sir Robert’s Houghton Hall as a house which ‘matched the man’, with ‘room after room filled with pictures from floor to ceding, the Gallery, the Salon, the Carlo Maratti Room and all the other rooms with their profusion of pleasant family portraits, indifferent hunting scenes, and unrivalled masterpieces by every painter whose work was admired by the cognoscenti in the reign of George II’. There were twenty Van Dycks, nineteen Rubens, eight Titians, five Murillos, three works each by Veronese and Guido Reni, two by Velásquez, a Frans Hals, a Raphael and a Poussin. John Wilkes, the politician and reformer, advised the British parliament to turn it into a National Gallery – ‘a noble gallery ought to be built in the garden of the British Museum for the reception of this invaluable collection’. Instead, the finest pictures – not including the family portraits – were bought by Catherine for a sum variously reported as £35,000, £40,000 and £45,000.

If Catherine’s picture purchases were primarily motivated by political considerations rather than a love of art, her interest in building was a genuine passion. ‘Building is a devilish affair,’ she wrote to Grimm in 1779. ‘It eats money and the more one builds, the more one wants to build; it is an illness like drunkenness.’ Within weeks of her 1762 coup she had ordered a Chinese pavilion at Oranienbaum, the country estate where she and Peter had been living, from the Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi. She was so delighted with it that she asked Rinaldi to build a palace for her lover Grigory Orlov in the heart of St Petersburg, using the coloured marbles that had recently been found in the Urals. The Marble Palace, built between 1768 and 1785, a couple of hundred yards up the bank of the Neva from the Winter Palace, is a masterpiece of Neoclassicism and one of the loveliest buildings in the city. The façade and interiors create subtle colour harmonies by juxtaposing different marbles.

In 1759 the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe had been invited to St Petersburg to design an Academy of Arts. Catherine approved his plans and construction began in 1764 – the huge and handsome building was one of the first Classical revival buildings in Russia. Indeed, she was so impressed that she commissioned him to design her first extension to the Winter Palace – the Small Hermitage. Its pillared façade repeats the design of the Academy on a miniature scale.

These early commissions already underline the Classical orientation of Catherine’s taste, which became more pronounced as her reign continued. The Small Hermitage, incorporating a hanging garden built over the stables with apartments at either end, was ready for use in 1769 but Catherine’s imagination moved faster than her architects. She immediately asked for picture galleries to be added down each side of the garden and in 1770 she decided that she needed a major museum building for her rapidly expanding collection. She commissioned a much larger Classical building from Yury Velten, a St Petersburg-born architect of German extraction. The three-storey, ten-window extension was completed in 1776 and then she enlarged it again; the seventeen-window version, now known as the Old Hermitage, was finished in 1787. The design is severe – it has no pillars or ornaments – and relies for its impact on perfecdy balanced Classical proportions. Velten also masterminded the cladding of the Neva banks with granite to produce the present embankments.

Catherine’s last extension of the Hermitage was entrusted to the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi, a great master who has left his mark all over St Petersburg. In the early 1780s he added a loggia to Velten’s Old Hermitage to contain the painted copies of Raphael’s Vatican frescoes, which Catherine had ordered from Rome. The copies were painted on canvas under the direction of the Austrian artist Christoph Unterberger between 1778 and 1785, then rolled up and sent to St Petersburg where they nearly, but not quite, fitted Quarenghi’s building. After the loggia, Quarenghi was commissioned to build a theatre on the other side of the Winter Canal, connected to the Old Hermitage by a bridge; it took four years to complete, from 1783–7.

Catherine had gone theatre-mad in the 1780s and even wrote plays herself. An Englishman who visited St Petersburg described one of her plays called Olga as ‘a tragedy with choruses, like the ancients: there are no less than 30 personages in the play, two emperors and the rest of proportionate rank; the suite consists of 600 people who are all to be on stage at once’. This must have been an exaggeration. Six hundred people would not fit on the stage, flanked by pink marble columns and classical statues, of Quarenghi’s theatre, an imitation of the famous theatre Palladio built in Vicenza, Italy, a hundred years before – which, in its turn, had been copied from the Roman theatre at Orange in France. Like a Roman theatre it has semicircular banks of seats looking down on the stage. The building has a pillared façade, finely proportioned and more ornamental than Velten’s.

Catherine’s interest in architecture rubbed off on her collections. In 1773, using the good offices of Falconet, she commissioned a series of drawings for a garden pavilion from the French architect and decorator Charles Louis Clérisseau, who had spent twenty years in Rome and was one of the pioneers of Neoclassical design. He loved Roman ruins, which he incorporated into many of his designs and gained an international reputation – he advised Thomas Jefferson on the construction of the Capitol building in Virginia.

Catherine wanted her pavilion to look just like a Roman villa on the outside and to have interiors furnished as nearly as possible after the Antique. She stipulated that it should be ‘neither very large, nor very small’. The commission went to Clérisseau’s head and he sent eighteen large cases of drawings for a huge Roman palace, accompanied by a correspondingly large bill. Prince Golitsyn, Diderot and several other notables were dragged into the conflict over the fee, which outraged Catherine. However, five years later she had forgiven Clérisseau and was buying more drawings. She made him an honorary member of the St Petersburg Academy and First Architect to the Court, ending up with over 1,000 of his drawings – but no buildings. She hung seventeen of his gouaches of ancient Roman monuments round her boudoir in the Winter Palace.

Rome, rather than Paris, was the crucible in which Neoclassicism was fired. From there the writings of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the paintings of his disciple Anton Raffael Mengs attracted the attention of Europe’s connoisseurs, naturally including Catherine. Her enthusiasm for Classical and Neoclassical art is reflected in both her buildings and her collections. However, she was not as well connected in Rome as she was in Paris. Her most useful contact proved to be Ivan Shuvalov, the last lover en titre of the Empress Elizabeth and the founder and first president of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts.

Some unforgivable action – hinted at in Catherine’s letters but not spelt out – led Shuvalov to accept voluntary exile in the early days of her reign, moving to Rome in late 1762. He did not expect to return and gave his remarkable collection of paintings to the Academy, whence they were transferred to the Hermitage after the 1917 Revolution. From Rome he sent back plaster casts of antiquities for ‘his’ Academy, which Catherine much admired and had copied in bronze for the park at Tsarskoe Selo. Their relations began to improve and he sent her twelve volumes of engravings by Piranesi; she was delighted and wrote to Grimm regretting that Piranesi had not done more work. In 1785 she purchased the collection of Antique sculpture Shuvalov had bought for himself in Rome.

To these she added, in the same year, some 250 Antique sculptures from the collection of John Lyde-Brown, a director of the Bank of England, at a cost of £23,000. He had acquired his collection over a period of thirty years, mainly in Rome, and established a museum-quality display in his villa at Wimbledon, just outside London. There was a great fashion for collecting newly excavated sculptures in Italy in the mid-eighteenth century but collectors and dealers liked to improve the fragmentary remains that were found – adding heads to torsos that did not really match and supplying missing body parts with newly carved marble. Oskar Waldhauer, the scholar who was in charge of the Classical collection at the Hermitage just before and after the Revolution, ripped the Lyde-Brown statues apart and reassembled them, without their eighteenth-century additions, making many remarkable discoveries in the process.

Lyde-Brown had also purchased a few Renaissance sculptures in Italy. That is how Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy arrived in Russia, also a puzzle sculpture of a Cupid on a Dolphin in Renaissance style. It was published as the work of Raphael’s associate, Lorenzetto, when in the hands of the fashionable eighteenth-century sculptor and restorer, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, but in the 1960s the American scholar Seymour Howard proclaimed it a fake, cooked up by Cavaceppi himself, possibly with the assistance of the English sculptor Joseph Nollekens. The latter, who lived in Rome and restored ancient sculptures for English tourists, made no fewer than four copies of the statue – for David Garrick, Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Exeter and the Earl of Bristol. The Hermitage has yet another theory that Lyde-Brown got his hands on a sculpture described as ‘Un Puttino morta sopra un Delfino ferito’ in the 1633 inventory of the Ludovisi family’s art collection in Rome. If so, it is by a little-known sculptor called Giulio Cesare Conventi whose only claim to fame is having taught the great Baroque sculptor Alessandro Algardi. It seems likely that someone will eventually work out whether the sculpture was made in the fifteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century.

Catherine kept these pieces, along with Lyde-Brown’s Antique sculptures, in her lakeside Grotto at Tsarskoe Selo, an elegant domed pavilion whose interior was originally encrusted with 250,000 shells. In subsequent years the sculptures were dispersed to other palaces but the best were gathered up again in 1852 to decorate the Classical galleries of the New Hermitage.

Antique gems, carved with portrait and other images, were, however, Catherine’s greatest enthusiasm in the Classical field. In the spring of 1782 she wrote to Grimm:

My little collection of engraved gems is such that yesterday four people could only just carry two baskets filled with drawers containing roughly half the collection; and, so that you don’t get the wrong impression, you should know that they were using the baskets that carry wood for the fires in winter and that the drawers were sticking out a long way; from that you can judge the gluttonous greed that we suffer from under this heading.

Her most important acquisition in this field came in 1787 when she bought the collection of the Duc d’Orléans, revolutionary politician and father of King Louis-Philippe of France. It contained 1,500 gems and was one of the most famous in Europe. After this Catherine was able to confide to Grimm that: ‘All the cabinets of Europe are only childish accumulations compared to ours.’

She loved her gems so much that she took them with her to the country in summer in a special carriage, along with the necessary reference books. And she commissioned a series of rich cabinets to contain them from the most renowned furniture maker of the day, David Roentgen – who lived in Germany but worked for all the courts of Europe, notably for Marie-Antoinette. His furniture combined architectural design, fine marquetry and inlays, and ingenious mechanical devices. While most of the furniture Catherine commissioned was not regarded as art by the curators sorting the imperial possessions after 1917, they kept twenty-two Roentgen pieces which are now rated among the highlights of the applied arts collection.

All the court came to share in Catherine’s enthusiasm for engraved gems and many of them even tried their own hands at engraving them. The Empress employed an artist chemist, Georg König, and a gem cutter, Karl Leberecht, to carve new gems recording her family, her friends and her victories – they also made glass reproductions of her Antique pieces. She ordered glass reproductions of all the most famous collections of Europe from James Tassie in London, a total of some 10,000 items, delivered in elegant cabinets designed by James Wyatt. In a letter to the most influential of all her lovers, Grigory Potemkin, then fighting the Turks in the south, she wrote: ‘I am sending you a portrait, engraved after a gem, of the conqueror of Ochakov; both the gem and the portrait have been cut in my Hermitage.’

The ‘conqueror’ she referred to was, of course, Potemkin himself – Ochakov was a strategically crucial Black Sea fort he won from the Turks in 1788. In another letter she reports that her new lover Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov ‘cut with his own hands the camelian seal sent with the present testimonial’. Her daughter-in-law, Maria Fedorovna, cut portraits of her husband, the future Paul I, their sons Alexander and Constantine and of Catherine herself as Minerva – which the Empress graciously described as ‘a very good likeness and excellently cut’. They were later copied by Wedgwood in jasper ware.

Catherine’s many lovers and favourites had an influence on the Hermitage collections that went far beyond carved gems. She was immensely generous, showering them with serfs, palaces, jewels and every luxury, and developed the habit of buying back the collections of those who died. The French diplomat J. H. Castera, who published a life of Catherine in 1797, drew up an approximate account of what she had spent on them:

The five Orlov brothers 17,000,000 roubles
Vysotsky 300,000 roubles
Vasilchikov 1,110,000 roubles
Potemkin 50,000, 000 roubles
Zavadovsky 1,380,000 roubles
Zorich 1,420,000 roubles
Rimsky-Korsakov 920,000 roubles
Lanskoy 7,260,000 roubles
Ermolov 550,000 roubles
Mamonov 880,000 roubles
The Zubov brothers 3,500,000 roubles

Not only was Grigory Orlov her longest-running lover, but she also owed a special debt to his family, who were the architects of her coup – and the executioners of her husband. The silver dinner service made by Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers in Paris, now known as the Orlov Service, was one of her most spectacular presents to him. She had originally intended it for her own use.

In February 1770 she wrote to Falconet: ‘I’ve heard that you have some designs for a silver service; I would love to see them if you would show me them since it is quite possible that I might dream of ordering one large enough to serve 60 or so persons.’ The drawings found favour and Falconet selected the Paris silversmith Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers, who had made a service for Louis XV which he admired just before leaving France for St Petersburg.

The service Catherine ended up ordering was so large that Roettiers had to farm out the commission to selected colleagues – there were 3,000 pieces and most of them were made in the space of eighteen months. There were, for example, forty-eight dozen plates, eighty-four chandeliers and thirty-six candelabras. She gave the service to Orlov in 1772 when they were reconciled after a lovers’ tiff and shipments from Paris continued to be made to his Marble Palace up to 1775. Catherine got it back in July 1784, one year after his death. Much of the service got lost, melted down or muddled up with other services during the first century of its existence – only 1,041 pieces were recorded in the 1859 inventory of the Winter Palace. There are now 230 pieces from the service recorded in collections outside Russia – items sold off to earn the Soviets foreign currency in the 1920s and 1930s – and 169 recorded pieces in Russia itself, of which 123 are in the Armoury Museum in the Kremlin and forty-six in the Hermitage.

Beside Potemkin, however, Catherine’s generosity to the Orlovs takes a modest second place. Grigory Potemkin was the only lover whose brains qualified him to share with Catherine the responsibilities of state, a forceful, moody character to whom Catherine may have been secretly married. He was her lover for only two years, from 1774 to 1776, but remained her close adviser and the most powerful man in the Empire until his death in 1791, even helping her to choose her subsequent lovers. He commanded her armies in the south in their campaigns against the Turks and she made him governor of the new territories he had helped her to acquire there. In 1787 she gave him a new title, Prince of Tauris. In Greek mythology the Crimea was known as Tauris, its fame assured by Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris.

The palace that Potemkin built in St Petersburg is known to this day as the Tauride Palace. It was designed by Ivan Starov, a Russian pupil of Vallin de la Mothe, with a central dome and single-storey pillared portico, connected, left and right, to two-storeyed pavilions. This Neoclassical design was so admired that it was adapted for the construction of more modest villas all over Russia. The palace was to play a key role in the Revolution – both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet first met there, although both moved out in the course of the year.

Potemkin’s most important impact on the Hermitage collection lies in his partiality for British art – both pictures and objects. Catherine bought no fewer than three paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby in the 1770s – an artist whose importance has only been fully appreciated in Britain in the twentieth century – including one of the first industrial scenes ever depicted, An Iron Forge Viewed from Without. She acquired it through her London agent Alexander Baxter in early 1774 when Potemkin was the dominating force in her life, both in bed and outside it. In 1785 both of them commissioned paintings from Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy – historical scenes rather than the portraits that are found in British country houses. Catherine got The Infant Hercules Killing Snakes and Potemkin The Continence of Scipio and Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus. All three are now in the Hermitage.

A Landscape with Dido and Aeneas by Thomas Jones, a Seashore by William Marlow and a Godfrey Kneller portrait also arrived in the museum from Potemkin’s collection after his death. In the field of the applied arts, the most spectacular impact of his taste is reflected in objects he purchased from the infamous Duchess of Kingston, a beautiful bigamist who arrived in St Petersburg with a boatload of family treasures. His Kingston purchases included a vast wine cooler made in London in 1705–6 by Philip Rollos and a musical clock in the form of a life-size gilt metal peacock standing under a small gilt-metal oak tree. They provide a vivid illustration of his taste for the flamboyant and theatrical.

Potemkin’s most famous achievement in this vein was a journey to the Crimea that he orchestrated for Catherine, her court and the entire diplomatic corps – a total suite of 3,000 people – in 1787. They travelled down the Dnieper by boat in seven enormous red and gold barges – for the Empress and her most important guests – and seventy smaller ones. Potemkin packed the banks with loyal subjects performing – Cossacks on horseback and maidens dancing. ‘Groups of peasants enlivened the beaches; innumerable boats, with young girls and boys on board, singing rustic local tunes, surrounded us all the time; nothing had been forgotten,’ wrote the Comte de Segur. It was reported that Potemkin even had fake villages erected to suggest settlements where there were none. As a result, the term ‘Potemkin villages’, meaning show without substance, has entered the Russian language.

The silver wine cooler Potemkin bought from the Duchess of Kingston was used as a container for fish soup at a famously lavish party he threw for Catherine in April 1791. ‘On both days there were quadrilles and small balls,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘when 180 and never less than 100 places were laid and at which the fish soup alone cost more than 1,000 roubles. It filled a vast seven or eight pood silver chalice. Two people standing served the whole table and when the serving was finished there was still enough soup left for the same number of guests.’ In 1996 when the wine cooler was being restored for exhibition in America, the Hermitage conservators found they were unable to clean its interior – until they were told about the soup. It had retained a thin veil of grease for 200 years which the conservators, once alerted, found they could remove with ordinary kitchen soda.

The arrival of the Duchess of Kingston in St Petersburg in her so-called bateau-musée is one of the most curious incidents of Catherine’s reign. Born Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1720, she achieved a succès de scandale in London. Among her many escapades was that of attending the Venetian ambassador’s ball naked. In 1744 she secretly married a young naval lieutenant, Augustus Hervey, who later became third Earl of Bristol, and in 1769 the fabulously wealthy Duke of Kingston, who died four years later. In 1776 she was arraigned for bigamy before Britain’s High Court of Parliament and found guilty – but let off with a fine.

The deceased Duke’s nephew launched a lawsuit with the aim of wresting the Kingston fortune from her hands. The Duchess escaped to the Continent where she set about dazzling Rome, Paris and Vienna while she fought the case through lawyers, and eventually won. In 1777 she determined to visit Russia and ‘had built a ship with very splendid accommodation’, according to a contemporary biographer. ‘There was a drawing room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom and every convenience to be found in a suite of family chambers.’

Catherine was much taken with the Duchess, giving her a fine house in St Petersburg and a nearby estate. The Empress was busy laying out new gardens at the time – in the English style – so the Duchess summoned the Kingston gardener from Thoresby, in Yorkshire, to work for the court. ‘Mr Mowat’, who now styled himself ‘Gardener to Her Imperial Majesty Empress of all The Russians’, wrote home describing the splendour of the Duchess’s life-style. ‘Her Grace has fitted up a very large House here in the most Ellegant manner possible, Crimson Damask hangings, Do. Window Curtains, Most splendid five Musical Lustres! Grand Organ, plate, paintings! and other ornaments displayed to the greatest advantage.’

Many of these are now in the Hermitage. When the Duchess died in Paris in August 1788 she left an elaborate will with a series of blanks where she had failed to fill in the beneficiaries’ names. There were two contestants for her Russian property but Colonel M. Garnovsky, who had been Potemkin’s personal aide, was backed by Catherine and won the day. Through him Potemkin got hold of many Kingston possessions. The organ referred to by Mr Mowat can almost certainly be identified with the one now displayed in the Grand Salon of the Hermitage out-station in the Menshikov Palace and regularly used for concerts. In fact, it is two organs, a clock with a mechanical organ above a boxed organ which can be played in the ordinary way; both are English and cased in mahogany with gilt embellishments. Both organs played at the last great party Potemkin threw for Catherine in 1791, shortly before his death. The Russian poet Gavriil Derzhavin was there and noted the ‘two gilded great organs that share our attention and deepen our joy’. According to him, ‘the Empress left after one o’clock. As she was leaving the room, you could hear soft singing accompanied by the organ. They were singing an Italian cantata.’

Other Kingston pieces which embellish the museum galleries include Pierre Mignard’s painting of the Magnanimity of Alexander the Great, a series of cartoons for tapestries by Rubens’ pupils and, of course, the Peacock Clock. For anyone lucky enough to hear it chime, the clock is particularly memorable. It was made by the Duchess’s favourite London jeweller James Cox, best known for the elaborate, jewel-encrusted clocks he made for the Oriental market. First a chime of bells starts to play and an owl moves his head from side to side. Then the peacock, which stands on a metal hill, begins to spread his tail while nodding his head in a most realistic manner; he executes a 180-degree turn to display his tail feathers from behind. And finally a metal cock lifts his head and begins to crow. The clock face is on the head of a mushroom under the gilt-bronze oak tree; a dragonfly sitting on the mushroom marks the seconds.

The Duchess brought the clock to St Petersburg carefully disassembled, with hundreds of delicate pieces of mechanism packed separately. Potemkin acquired it in 1788 in this state and so it passed to Catherine. It took a gifted Russian mechanic and inventor, Ivan Kulibin, two years, from 1792 to 1794, to make it work.