By the end of Catherine’s reign the Hermitage was beginning to take on the character of a museum. The lower orders were, of course, denied entrance but no well-bred traveller’s account of a visit to St Petersburg in the last decade of the eighteenth century omits a tour of the galleries. And a special room, on the eastern side of the hanging garden, was set aside for artists to copy in.

An English visitor called John Parkinson was shown around in 1792 by the Italian architect, Giacomo Quarenghi, who had designed Catherine’s Hermitage Theatre and the Raphael Loggia. His account catches the feel of the times:

The Empress having graciously permitted all the foreigners in Petersburg to see the Hermitage — this morning we repaired thither between the hours of ten and eleven…. We were not permitted to enter with swords or sticks; but they were required to be delivered up before we went in. Quarenghi joined us there and was of great service to us in pointing out what particularly deserved our attention. In so short a time, however, and in such a crowd, it was impossible to see such a profusion to any good purpose or with any satisfaction.

We first saw the Royal apartments, which occupy that side of the building which fronts towards the river, we then passed through the picture Galleries which form the three other sides of a square. Afterwards we went by Raphael’s Gallery to the Cabinet of Medals, Mineralogy and what I must call for want of a better word ‘bijouterie’…. The Apartments as well as the Galleries are crowded with paintings, good and bad placed promiscuously together.

At this period visitors were required to use a side entrance under the arch over the Winter Canal. They took the stairs to the first floor where three doors led out of a vestibule embellished with a statue of Cupid and Psyche. One door led to the theatre foyer which was hung with paintings, the second to the Raphael Loggia and three adjoining rooms which contained the minerals collection, precious objects – such as Catherine’s engraved gems – and more paintings, and the third opened onto the suite of fourteen picture galleries in the Old Hermitage which Velten had built for Catherine along the banks of the Neva.

Catherine’s death in 1796, four years after John Parkinson’s visit, severed the highly personal relationship between ruler and art. The collection as it existed in 1796 was almost entirely her own making and it was housed in buildings which she had planned and commissioned. In the hands of her son Paul I, who reigned from 1796 to 1801, and her grandson Alexander I (1801–25) it became institutionalised. The collections were cared for by an administrator and professional staff – the tsars treated them as a responsibility rather than a source of personal delight.

For Paul, who felt a bitter antipathy to his mother, it was a trial to use or touch anything that had been hers. He would not live in the Winter Palace, preferring to build himself a new home, the Mikhail Castle, on the other side of town. Nevertheless, he was a man of culture with a strong interest in art, architecture and the applied arts – he liked to visit craftsmen and know how things were made – and many purchases he made for other homes have now been incorporated into the Hermitage collections. The silver console tables and candelabras he commissioned from the St Petersburg silversmith Ivor Buch for the throne room in the Mikhail Castle have, for example, joined a giltwood replica of Anna Ivanovna’s English silver throne in the Winter Palace small throne room.

His son Alexander, in contrast, was devoted to the memory of his grandmother but had little time for art. He began his reign with a burning interest in social reform which he later regretfully abandoned as impractical; combating Napoleon then became his chief concern and, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, the remodelling of Europe. Christian mysticism was the dominating interest of his later years – there is even a legend that he faked his death in 1825 and started a new life as a holy man in Siberia. The care he took to restructure the Hermitage administration, in his reforming mode, and the acquisition of art from the collection of Napoleon’s estranged wife, the Empress Josephine, were his two major contributions to the museum.

Both Paul and Alexander were subject to the kind of psychological pressures which would land a modern man jittering on the analyst’s couch. Indeed, it is arguable that Paul had lost his reason by the time he succeeded to the throne. He had been taken from his mother within minutes of his birth and brought up by the Empress Elizabeth. He was eight when she died and, within six months, his mother’s friends had assassinated his father, Peter III. Alexander was also removed from his mother as a baby and brought up by the Empress – this time by Catherine the Great. At the age of twenty-three he collaborated in a plot to oust his father, though he was probably unaware that his friends intended assassination.

Paul was Peter III’s legitimate heir and Catherine was wary of any signs of popular support for him, aware that he was the natural focus for any plot to oust her. She gave him no responsibilities or opportunities to shine in public life. She also removed his first two children so as to bring them up herself – just as the Empress Elizabeth had removed Paul. There is little wonder that Paul hated her and refused to live in the shadow of her art collections.

Catherine, for her part, doted on Paul’s two sons, Alexander born in 1777 and Constantine in 1779 – she even designed the perfect baby garment. Sending a sketch to Grimm, she wrote: ‘It is all stitched together, you put on all at once, and it closes at the back with four or five little hooks. There are no bindings and the child hardly notices that he is being dressed; one pushes his arms and legs into the costume all at once, and that’s it. This garment is a stroke of genius on my part. The King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia have asked for and obtained copies of Master Alexander’s costume.’

To celebrate Alexander’s birth, Catherine gave Paul and his wife Maria Fedorovna a vast tract of country to the south of the imperial palace of Tsarskoe Selo, 1,500 acres of virgin forest. In adapting the wild terrain into an exquisite pavilioned park with a small but exceptionally beautiful Neoclassical palace, to be known as Pavlovsk, the couple discovered their interest in architecture, sculpture and interior decoration. They collected Neoclassical art and artefacts, a taste which remains well represented in the Hermitage Museum as a result.

Paul and Maria were exposed to the very finest in European art, old and new, during a fourteen-month tour which Catherine bullied them into making in 1781–2. Paul feared that it was an excuse to get him out of the way so that Alexander might be declared her heir and almost refused to go, but it turned out a great success. The imperial couple travelled incognito as the Comte and Comtesse du Nord, but every court in Europe had been alerted to their visit and they took a large retinue. It may have been the happiest period of Paul’s life. He was treated everywhere as a future emperor, entertained with splendour and showered with gifts.

In Venice he entered into negotiations to buy the important sculpture collection formed by Filippo Farsetti (1704–74), which contained a mix of casts of Antique sculptures and terracotta models by leading seventeenth-century sculptors, such as Algardi and Bernini. It was the casts that had made the collection famous in Venice – Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista Pittoni and Canova had all visited Farsetti to sketch them – but today’s connoisseurs come to the Hermitage to see the terracottas. It was the imperial family’s first major acquisition of modern sculpture since Peter the Great’s purchases at the beginning of the century.

So important did the Venetians consider the collection that they initially refused to allow its export. Paul left without it but did not forget his enthusiasm. After the annexation of Venice by France in 1797, when the Republic’s old export laws were jettisoned, he completed his purchase. The first shipment of 308 cases of sculpture arrived in St Petersburg in March 1800; a second shipment of sixty-three cases arrived in October of the same year. Paul donated the collection to the Academy of Arts, whence the best pieces were removed to the Hermitage after the 1917 Revolution.

In Paris the imperial couple indulged in an epic spending spree. They visited the Sèvres factory where they received over one hundred pieces as gifts from its patron Louis XVI and bought as much again on their own account. They acquired several dinner, tea and toilet services, as well as sets of vases, figures and medallions. Most of the surviving pieces are exhibited at Pavlovsk but among those that found their way to the Hermitage is the most expensive of all Louis XVI’s gifts to the imperial couple – a Vase Bachelier beau bleu Emaillé, valued by the factory at 1,800 livres.

The couple’s connoisseurship and appetite for detailed information was remarked upon at every stop on their journey. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who had entertained them in Vienna, wrote his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, a letter of advice on how to handle their visit to Florence. ‘They are particularly interested in anything that is old or curious and in buildings which are at all remarkable either for size or beauty. And that is why they must not be over-wearied by seeing too many things the same day, but have, if possible, the opportunity of examining all that is remarkable and interesting in detail.’

Following their visit to Paris, the Chevalier du Coudray wrote a similar account of their enthusiasm. ‘M. the Comte and Mme the Comtesse du Nord have surprised everyone with their extensive knowledge of all the arts and trades. In our factories they enter into the tiniest details with the workers, using technical words and employing artistic terms as well as the craftsmen.’

The couple patronised the furniture merchant Dominique Daguerre, the leading supplier of rich furnishings to the court and the aristocracy. On 25 May 1784 they spent 35,093 livres at his shop, coming away with four pieces of furniture made by the great ébéniste Martin Carlin who specialised in encrusting his furniture with Sèvres porcelain plaques painted with brightly coloured flowers on a white background. Maria Fedorovna placed a little library table with a frieze of porcelain plaques, edged with gilt bronze mouldings, in her bedroom at Pavlovsk. It was sold off by the Soviet government in the 1930s and has passed through the auction rooms twice since World War II, setting a new record auction price for any piece of furniture at 165,000 guineas in 1971 and selling for £918,000 to the Getty Museum in 1983. Among the finest pieces that remain in St Petersburg are a secretaire and four commodes attributed to Adam Weisweiler, another great Neoclassical furniture maker, all with Wedgwood and Sèvres plaques cunningly incorporated in their design.

The furnishings that the Grand Duke and Duchess brought back from Paris started a craze for French furniture in St Petersburg. Catherine had tended to favour English and German furniture over French – she bought many mahogany and ormolu chefs-d’œuvres by David Roentgen which were the inspiration of the following generation of Russian cabinetmakers. So imported French furniture had rarity value – but not for long. Captured by the elegance of the pieces that Paul and Maria brought back with them, the Russian aristocracy besieged Paris merchants with their orders and French imports poured into St Petersburg. The nationalisation of private collections after the Revolution landed some of the most outstanding pieces in the Hermitage.

Not all the imperial couple’s purchases were equally well received. Maria returned with ‘200 cases filled with chiffon, pompoms and other toiletries from Paris’, according to the British ambassador, Sir James Harris. Catherine considered this excessive and made her return them to the famous Paris modiste, Mlle Bertin, who, according to Grimm, was enraged and ‘defended her flounces’.

Maria was not, however, a feather-brained princess who was only interested in clothes. She was a notable connoisseur and artist in her own right and through the good taste she passed on to her two sons, the emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I, she contributed significantly to the flowering of the applied arts in Russia in the early nineteenth century; Russian furniture, tapestry, glass, porcelain and silver all recorded splendid aesthetic and technical achievements at this time. Even Catherine admired Maria’s skill at cutting engraved gems. The portrait cameo she cut of Catherine herself was sent to Wedgwood to be copied in jasper. Maria also painted, designed furniture and tried her hand at lathework. In 1795 she wrote a detailed description of how she had furnished Pavlovsk.

The way in which she dwells on the details of furniture, textiles, porcelains and other rich materials clearly demonstrates her fascination with the decorative arts. The description she gives of her husband’s desk reveals both her own skills and her taste for the sumptuous:

Almost under the archway of the study is a very large writing table like that by Roentgen. It is supported by twelve ivory columns which I turned on a lathe. A sort of raised desk of an elegant shape covers one third of the table and provides a base for an ivory temple, square in shape, of fine architecture; on the pediment of the temple is a cameo of the Grand Duke, mounted in clear glass on which I have painted a trophy in grisaille. On the other side of the pediment is the Grand Duke’s monogram. On the base of the temple are more paintings in grisaille; in the middle of the temple is an eight-sided altar made of amber and ivory; on the central one is my monogram in a medallion, painted on glass and mounted in amber; on the other sides are medallions of my seven children, starting with Alexander, whose monogram is linked with that of Elizabeth, and finishing with the late dear Olinka. (I gave this present to the dear Grand Duke last year when dear Olinka was still alive and Annette was not yet born.) I have painted all the children’s monograms in roses and myrtles.

When Maria gave birth to the first of her six daughters, Alexandra Pavlovna, in 1783, Catherine commented, ‘I love boys far more than girls’ and left them to bring up their own daughters. But she gave Paul another palace to celebrate Alexandra’s birth, Gatchina, the Neoclassical jewel built by Antonio Rinaldi for Grigory Orlov, some twenty miles south of Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine’s former lover had died in 1781 and Catherine bought the presents she had lavished on him, such as Gatchina, back from his heirs.

Denied the opportunity to take any part in government, Paul retired to Gatchina, a flourishing estate with more than 6,000 serfs, and began to run it as a sort of mini-kingdom, a testing ground for his political theories. He secured a battalion of troops to defend it and appointed a goose-stepping Prussian, Baron Steinwehr, to command them. That seems to have been his undoing. Like his father – indeed, imitating his father – Paul hero-worshipped Frederick the Great and now sought to apply the same rigid disciplines that Frederick had developed for the parade ground on his own troops, brutally castigating any soldier with so much as a button out of place.

Paul drilled and paraded as if his life depended on it and began to apply the same discipline to other spheres of life, including his family. He alienated his wife and – which may have been worse for Russia – infected his sons Alexander and Nicholas with his military mania. Plasterwork arms and trophies abound in the interior decoration of the Winter Palace, mostly created on the instructions of Paul’s son, Nicholas I. Nicholas also bought battle paintings by the score, most of them now sold off or consigned to the Hermitage storerooms.

When Catherine died in 1796, Paul’s long period of waiting in the wings was over. He emerged from Gatchina embittered, suspicious, determined to contradict all Catherine’s policies and to impose Prussian-style discipline on his empire. Alexander, his son and heir, watched with dismay. In a letter to his former tutor he expressed his concern:

One of Paul’s first initiatives was to order his father’s bones to be exhumed from their resting place at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. It was an insult to Peter’s memory that he should be there since the Peter and Paul Cathedral, within the walls of the ancient fortress of the same name, was the official burial ground for monarchs. Paul ordered that his father’s coffin should be in state beside his mother in the Winter Palace. He placed a banner above them that read, ‘Divided in life, united in death’. Then he ordered a joint funeral. Peter’s assassin, Alexey Orlov, now an old man, was made to carry his victim’s crown on a cushion at the head of the procession.

Paul now also began to play musical chairs with his art works. The Hermitage was initially neglected since he had moved his residence elsewhere, but in 1797 he appointed Prince Nikolay Yusupov administrator of the ‘museum’. Yusupov was a connoisseur and collector much valued by Catherine, who had appointed him director of her Tapestry Works in 1789 and director of the Imperial Glass and Porcelain Factories in 1792. However, he had also accompanied Paul and Maria on their European trip in 1782 and Paul apparently trusted him. Yusupov persuaded Paul to allocate funds for the upkeep of the Hermitage galleries, even including the birds, trees and flowers in the hanging garden.

Then he changed his mind. He sent 200 paintings each to Gatchina and Pavlovsk; he moved eighty paintings to the Mikhail Castle – which came back after his death; he sent twenty-eight paintings to Tsarskoe Selo, seventy-two to Peterhof and twenty-three to a new palace that he was building on Kamenny Ostrov, an island on the Neva delta which the imperial family reserved for their own use. He removed the sculptures that Catherine had kept in the beautiful lakeside grotto pavilion at Tsarskoe Selo – including the great Antique pieces from the Lyde-Brown collection – and installed them in the Mikhail Castle; he moved the statuary from the Chinese Pavilion that Catherine had built at Oranienbaum, Menshikov’s seaside palace, to Gatchina and some statuary from Tsarskoe Selo to Pavlovsk.

Also, for some reason, he ordered his collector’s mark, a single ‘P’, to be appended to all the drawings in Catherine’s collection, a move which has proved very useful to latter-day scholars researching the provenance of drawings. Paul’s mark indicates that a drawing reached the Hermitage before 1801 – the year when his subjects could stand his erratic behaviour no longer and he was assassinated.

Paul had offended both the officer corps and the nobility. During his five-year reign he ordered the arrest of seven field marshals, 333 generals and 2,261 officers. The conspirators who plotted his overthrow were highly placed in the government and army – Count Nikita Panin, the vice-chancellor, Count Peter von Pahlen, governor-general of St Petersburg and foreign minister, Prince Platon Zubov, Catherine’s last lover en titre, his brother Nikolay Zubov, and General Levin Bennigsen. The latter led the group of soldiers who invaded Paul’s bedroom in the Mikhail Castle on the night of 23 March 1801. Paul was struck down by Nikolay Zubov and strangled by one of the officers.

Alexander, Paul’s eldest son, had supported the conspirators’ plan to wrest power away from his father but had believed it would be achieved without violence. He was apparently not privy to the planned assassination and Paul’s death filled him with horror. ‘I am the unhappiest man on the earth’, he told the Swedish ambassador, Count Karl Stedingk, on the first day of his reign.

Alexander was young, handsome, idealistic, not hugely intelligent, but initially much loved. In his accession manifesto he promised to rule ‘according to the spirit and laws’ of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and immediately set about undoing his father’s follies. He granted an amnesty to 12,000 prisoners. Together with a group of young friends, whom he laughingly referred to as his ‘Committee of Public Safety’, he began to draft wide-ranging constitutional reforms. However, they never became law. Like Catherine before him, he began to back-pedal on reform as he realised the damage it would inflict on his own position.

A new administrative system for the Hermitage was one result of his reformist zeal. In 1802 he appointed a well-known art collector and bibliophile, Count Dmitry Buturlin, administrator of the museum. Buturlin set about preparing a ‘most humble petition’ to the Emperor about the Hermitage which became the blueprint for its reform. Pointing out that an art collection is rightly judged by the quality of paintings it contains rather than their number – a consideration which Catherine in her pursuit of prestige had tended to overlook – Buturlin noted that the Hermitage was richly supplied with Dutch and French pictures but lacked Italian and Spanish works. ‘If we make good use of our opportunities to enlarge the collection of the Italian school – which has ever been the most difficult to assemble – ours will be the most outstanding collection in existence,’ he told the Emperor. He also advised that the Hermitage should be open to the public ‘at a fixed season of the year, on condition that certain inviolable rules be observed and under the supervision of specially appointed staff’. At last the collection was beginning to adopt the character of a museum rather than a private collection.

Alexander accepted Buturlin’s recommendations and in 1805 promulgated a ‘Rule on the Hermitage’. Under this decree the Hermitage was formally divided into five separate departments, each with its own curator. The ‘First Department’ comprised the library, engraved gems and medals, the ‘Second Department’ the picture gallery, bronzes, marbles and objets de vertu, the ‘Third Department’ engravings, the ‘Fourth Department’ drawings and the ‘Fifth Department’ natural history specimens and the collection of minerals.

The precedence given to the library no doubt reflected Buturlin’s own preoccupation with books. The ‘Second Department’ comprised the core of the museum, as we know it today, and was run by an artist called Franz Labensky who had been recruited in 1796 to take charge of the inventory of paintings in the Hermitage, Tauride and Marble Palaces ordered by Paul I – the Marble Palace built by Catherine for Grigory Orlov and the Tauride Palace for Grigory Potemkin were bought back by the crown after their deaths along with the best of the art they contained. Labensky acted as director of the picture gallery up to his death in 1849 and proved a notable connoisseur and enlightened administrator. Buturlin soon lost interest, moving first to Moscow and then to Florence.

One of Labensky’s first successes lay in persuading Alexander that the Hermitage should collect Russian painting. Catherine had only bought Old Masters and a few contemporary paintings by French and British artists, while Paul favoured artists that he had got to know in France, such as Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert. It was only in 1802, on Labensky’s urging, that Russian paintings began to be bought by the Hermitage in any numbers.

This was not as surprising as it may seem at first sight. Up to 1700 or so there was no Russian school of painting, unless one counts icons, which were mainly painted by monks in monastic workshops. In painting, as in many other fields, Russia joined the stream of European endeavour as a result of a sharp kick up the backside from Peter the Great. Peter imported artists, mainly from France, and required them to teach their skills to young Russians as part of their contract of employment. It was only during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth that an Academy of Art was established in St Petersburg.

The first significant achievements of Russian painting lay in the field of portraiture, for which there was a good demand at court. It was not until the nineteenth century that Russian artists began to tackle history, landscape and genre painting with outstanding success. The first Russian artists represented in the Hermitage included Andrey Martynov, Fedor Alekseev, Fedor Matveev, Vasily Shebuev and Aleksey Egorov.

In 1824 the collection was rehung in order to devote a gallery exclusively to Russian painting. The Emperor scoured his other palaces in order to bring together the best Russian works that he owned and made the attractive decision that this gallery, in particular, should always be run by an artist – recruited, of course, from the Imperial Academy of Arts. The gallery survived until 1898 when Nicholas II established what is now known as the Russian Museum, calling it the Alexander III Museum in memory of his father. While the Hermitage still has a good collection of Russian painting, the Russian Museum, magnificently housed in the Mikhail Palace, is now the national showcase.

It was Alexander’s dealings with Napoleon and his estranged wife Josephine that resulted in his reign’s most spectacular enrichment of the Hermitage. Napoleon himself was no mean connoisseur. As he crossed and recrossed Europe as a conqueror, he annexed the greatest art treasures of his enemies and sent them back to Paris to form the Napoleonic Museum in the Louvre. This short-lived institution was probably the greatest accumulation of art treasures ever gathered in one place – it was effectively a Supra-National Gallery of Europe. After Napoleon’s defeat the Allies, against Alexander’s advice, ordered the restitution of the treasures to their original owners. Most were duly returned, though a few of Napoleon’s trophies are still in Paris and thirty-eight paintings that Alexander purchased from Josephine’s heirs, while the other allied rulers were not looking, are now in the Hermitage.

Alexander changed sides in the Napoleonic wars more often than any ruler is supposed to do who comes out of an imbroglio smelling of roses – which was exactly what he, somewhat surprisingly, achieved. In 1814 he personally led the Russian army into Paris and was hailed as the Liberator of Europe. He also inadvertently coined the French word bistro; the Russian word bystro means ‘fast’ and the Russian soldiers’ constant call for fast food left behind a new name for the cheerful little restaurants of France.

In 1801, however, Alexander sided with the French. He told their ambassador, General G. Duroc: ‘I have always desired to see France and Russia as friends; these are the great and powerful nations … which must agree to put a stop to the little disagreements of the continent.’ In 1805 he changed his allegiance, joining Britain and Austria in an alliance against France. Austria and Russia were routed at the battle of Austerlitz where Alexander was leading the Russian army in person and was nearly captured.

Two years later, in February 1807, Napoleon won a bitter victory over Russia at Eylau – both sides lost about 20,000 men killed, wounded or captured – and suggested peace. So Alexander changed sides. The two emperors met on the only neutral territory they could find, a raft in the middle of the River Nieman at Tilsit. Alexander is said to have opened the conversation with the words: ‘Sire, I hate the English no less than you do and I am ready to assist you in any enterprise against them,’ and Napoleon is said to have replied: ‘In that case everything can be speedily settled between us and peace is made.’ Peace was to last for five years, until Napoleon with an army of 400,000 men invaded Russia in June 1812.

In 1808, in the wake of the Tilsit agreement, Alexander sent the Hermitage curator of paintings, Franz Labensky, to Paris in search of new acquisitions. Through the good offices of Napoleon, he was introduced to the director of the Napoleonic Museum at the Louvre, Dominique Vivant Denon, one of the most universally gifted connoisseurs of the period. Before the revolution Vivant Denon had been an attaché at the French embassy in St Petersburg and served as a diplomat in Sweden and Naples. He studied engraving and was subsequently taken up by Napoleon and Josephine. Having accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign, he published one of the first serious works on Egyptian archaeology, with his own text and engravings; he also was given charge of organising Napoleon’s military parades and the Musée du Louvre.

Labensky secured some important acquisitions, but better still he managed to recruit Vivant Denon himself as a buying agent for the imperial collection. The paintings of the Roman Giustiniani family had recently been sent to Paris for sale and before they were catalogued and offered elsewhere, Vivant Denon managed to secure a great Caravaggio, The Lute Player - a young boy playing the lute at a table spread with flowers, fruit and music. He bought a second work attributed to Caravaggio from the same collection, The Crucifixion of St Peter, which turned out to be a masterpiece by Caravaggio’s contemporary Lionello Spada.

Labensky went home with twenty-three paintings, including the first Dutch interior by Pieter de Hooch to reach the Hermitage collection, A Mistress and Her Maid. After his departure Vivant Denon took over, dispatching crate after crate of pictures to St Petersburg – two Murillos, a Francesco Bassano, a Guercino, a Luca Giordano and, from the Northern schools, a rare triptych by Maerten van Heemskerck, among many, many other works. The stream of new acquisitions only dried up when Napoleon invaded Russia and the two nations were once again at war.

Alexander was at a ball in Vilnius when the news of Napoleon’s invasion reached him on 24 June 1812 and he ‘suffered intensely in being obliged to show a gaiety which he was far from feeling’, according to his confidant Madame Choiseul-Gouffier. Napoleon defeated the Russians at the battle of Borodino, seventy-two miles west of Moscow, on 7 September and, advancing on Moscow, found the city evacuated and burning. Alexander, holed up in St Petersburg, fought as little as possible, aiming to starve Napoleon out of the country. For safety’s sake, however, he evacuated the Hermitage art collection to three small northern towns, Vytegra, Lodeinoe Pole and Kargopol. The division presumably reflected a hope that if one cache of art were found by Napoleon, the others might escape detection.

With a depleted army and no food – the Russian peasants destroyed their stores rather than hand them to the French – Napoleon was forced to retrace his steps. His army was worn down by the cold, snow and ice and harassed by guerrillas. He had entered Russia with an army of 400,000 in June but there were fewer than 40,000 left when he again reached the frontier on 13 December.

Now came Alexander’s hour of triumph. He took personal command of the Russian forces and pursued Napoleon into Prussia in January 1813. By June he had persuaded Austria and Prussia into an alliance and the three powers defeated Napoleon at Leipzig in October. And it was on Alexander’s urging that the Allies pursued the war into France itself. On 31 March 1814 the Russian army entered Paris with Alexander at its head.

The handsome young Tsar was soon more popular with the Parisians than the former Emperor. ‘Napoleon is my sole enemy,’ Alexander told them. ‘I promise my special protection to the town of Paris. I will guard and preserve all the public establishments. It is for yourselves to secure your own future happiness. I must give you a government that will ensure your own repose and that of Europe.’ Alexander played a key role in helping to establish a new order in France. He was initially in favour of a republic, as opposed to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and after Louis XVIII and the émigré nobles returned, was careful to see that the rights of those who had come to prominence during the Consulate and Empire were protected. The tender protection he extended to Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress Josephine, was a striking example of this policy.

When Napoleon had divorced Josephine in 1809, she received a magnificent settlement. She was allowed to keep the title and prerogatives of an Empress and was granted an annual allowance of three million francs and the Duchy of Navarre, over and above the palace of Malmaison, to the west of Paris, where she had lived with Napoleon. She also had estates in Switzerland and her native Martinique. Whether she would be allowed to retain her income and estates, following the defeat of her former husband, was naturally her overriding anxiety in April 1814. Alexander came out to Malmaison to reassure her and the two were soon firm friends. Josephine had the King of Prussia to dinner and Alexander was invited to come and help entertain him. He met Josephine’s daughter Hortense, the ex-Queen of Holland, and bounced her little son Louis Napoleon – the future Emperor Napoleon III of France – on his knee. Alexander wrote to his brother Constantine that Josephine reminded him of their grandmother Catherine the Great, both in her voice and appearance – she had become very stout in her old age.

Josephine was anxious to make a gesture which would adequately express her immense gratitude to her Russian protector. When Alexander visited Malmaison on 4 May 1814 she pressed one of the wonders of Antiquity into his hand — the Gonzaga cameo. The massive cameo is a double portrait exquisitely carved from an oval of sardonyx that measures roughly 6 ¼ by 4 ¾ inches. The style is Hellenistic and the two heads have traditionally been identified as the King of Egypt, Ptolemy II, who reigned from 285 to 246 BC, and his wife Arsinoe II. Some scholars have recently suggested that it may be a Roman imitation, dating from around AD 50 and depicting the military commander Germanicus and his wife Agrippina, but the Hermitage expert, Oleg Neverov, does not agree. It was already famous in the Renaissance when it belonged to Isabella d’Este and it subsequently passed to Queen Christina of Sweden, another avid collector, and from her to Pope Pius XII. It was stolen from the Vatican by a French soldier when Napoleon sacked Rome but was subsequently purchased by Napoleon himself as a present for Josephine.

At first Alexander refused to accept so valuable a present, telling Josephine that he would much prefer a porcelain cup decorated with her portrait which stood on a nearby table. However, he was persuaded to accept, and the Gonzaga cameo is now one of the great treasures of the Hermitage.

Alexander also exerted himself on behalf of Hortense, Josephine’s daughter by her first husband, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais. Hortense had been unhappily married to Napoleon’s younger brother Louis who became King of Holland and had already escaped to Switzerland. She now found herself without a husband or title. Alexander persuaded Louis XVIII, much against his will, to make her a duchess in her own right. Adopting the name of an estate she owned near Paris, Hortense became the Duchesse de St Leu. It was St Leu, however, that was her mother, Josephine’s, undoing. Hortense threw a ball there one chilly evening in late May. Josephine, scantily clad as was the fashion, opened the ball by dancing with Alexander, then walked with him for a long time in the garden discussing family affairs. She caught a chill and died five days later on 29 May. Alexander sent an aide-de-camp to attend her funeral and a guard of honour from the Russian army, a degree of attention which reputedly much annoyed Napoleon.

Josephine died three million francs in debt, which provided Alexander with the opportunity to secure another artistic coup on behalf of the Hermitage. Malmaison had been turned into a château-musée by Josephine, who was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic art collector – she had recently built on an art gallery to contain her large picture collection. Its crowning glory was a group of forty-eight pictures from the collection of the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel. The eighteenth-century ruler, Wilhelm VII, had put together one of the finest collections in Europe; Vivant Denon had difficulty selecting the 299 best pictures to take back to the Louvre as war booty after the battle of Jena in 1806. However, the cunning landgrave of the time had hidden forty-eight of the finest in a forester’s hut where they were found by General Lagrange who gave them directly to Josephine. Of these paintings, Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, a marvellous piece of realist narrative painting, is today considered one of the most important Old Master pictures in the Hermitage; Kassel also provided four of Claude Lorrain’s finest landscapes, a suite titled Morning, Noon, Evening and Night. Alexander bought thirty-eight paintings for which he paid 940,000 francs – while insisting that four white marble statues by Canova, the greatest sculptor of the Neoclassical age, should be thrown in as well.

The following year, as part of the peace settlement, the Allies directed that the Napoleonic Museum in the Louvre should be dismantled and the art works returned to their original owners. The representatives of the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel retrieved the 299 paintings taken to the Louvre, but when they got to Malmaison to collect the rest they found to their astonishment that the paintings had already been shipped to Russia. The landgrave demanded them back from Alexander who told him that he would only return them if his own expenses were refunded. Announcing that it was not his intention to pay double for his own pictures, the landgrave left the paintings in St Petersburg.

Despite his weighty responsibilities, Alexander made two other significant purchases for the Hermitage at this time. He bought a collection of Spanish paintings formed by the English banker William Coesvelt, which came up for sale in Amsterdam – no doubt remembering Buturlin’s advice that the Hermitage was short of good Spanish works. For 100,000 guilders he got fifteen paintings, including a Portrait of Olivares and two others by Velásquez, three Murillos, two Francisco Ribaltas and a much praised Childhood of the Virgin by Francisco de Zurbarán.

Around the same time Alexander bought a vast collection of English caricatures, mainly devoted to Napoleon and incidents during the Napoleonic wars. There is no record of where Alexander bought them or why. One presumes that his own close involvement in the Napoleonic saga gave the engravings their appeal. But the collection must have been bought en bloc and no trace has yet been found of their original owner. Alexander visited England in June 1814 – the first Russian sovereign to do so since Peter the Great – and may have bought them there. He was acclaimed by the crowds as a hero, much to the chagrin of the Prince Regent who described himself as ‘worn out with fuss, fatigue and rage’ after the first week of the visit. The prime minister, Lord Grey, described Alexander as ‘a vain, a silly fellow’.

In September 1814 Alexander, together with most of the crowned heads of Europe and all its leading politicians, arrived in Vienna for the Congress which was to resolve the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. Cities, islands, even countries changed hands in long sessions of hard bargaining while the younger generation danced the nights away. Alexander played a leading role in both the negotiations and the festivities, but the most significant event from the point of view of the Hermitage was the arrival of the British portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, who had been commissioned to paint full-length portraits of all the leaders of the campaign against Napoleon for Windsor Castle. The twenty-four portraits, which are considered Lawrence’s masterpieces, hang in what is known as the Waterloo Gallery. Lawrence’s fluid, impressionistic style was admired throughout Europe as a result. His influence can be traced in the work of Delacroix in France and the leading artists of the Austrian school, such as Peter Krafft and Peter Fendi.

Lawrence began his portrait of Alexander in London in 1814 and finished it at Aix-la-Chapelle, where the allied leaders met after the battle of Waterloo to complete the negotiations begun in Vienna. His admiration for Lawrence inspired Alexander to construct a gallery of his own in the Winter Palace, known as the Gallery of 1812. It runs between the Armorial Hall and the vast St George’s Hall, leading the visitor down towards the Cathedral. The barrel-vaulted gallery, designed by Carlo Rossi, contains 332 head and shoulders portraits of the Russian generals who fought in the wars against Napoleon. An English artist called George Dawe was awarded this vast commission. Now largely forgotten in England, Dawe was a celebrity in his day. He won the Royal Academy gold medal in 1803, attended surgical operations to study anatomy, wrote a treatise on the theory of colour, became ‘First Portrait Painter of the Imperial Court’ and the subject of an ode by Pushkin. According to Lawrence, his chief competitor, Dawe ‘prowled’ and ‘crept’ around the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in search of clients, thus winning the tsar’s attention and an invitation to St Petersburg. He had two assistants, Alexander Polyakov and Vasily Golike but painted nearly half the portraits himself, as well as a full- length portrait of Alexander to decorate the wall at the north end of the gallery.

The paintings were still not completed in 1825, the year that Alexander died, and it fell to his brother Nicholas I to complete the undertaking. He decided to add large-scale portraits of Russia’s two principal allies, Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia and Francis I of Austria, commissioning the leading portraitists of Berlin and Vienna, Franz Krüger and Peter Krafft, to make the paintings. Krüger’s meticulously painted Friedrich Wilhelm caused such a sensation in St Petersburg when it arrived in 1832 that he was asked to take away Dawe’s rendering of Alexander and paint a new one. A Russian traveller who saw him at work in Berlin in 1837 confessed himself ‘rather surprised, for Krüger was to paint the first faithful portrait of the deceased, whom he had never seen before, guided only by the somewhat inferior portrait by Dawe and a rather splendid death mask’. The circumstances of the picture’s creation have now been forgotten and it looks very splendid at the end of the gallery, where it is frequently photographed as a faithful likeness of the Emperor.

An attentive observer to the Gallery of 1812 will notice that there are thirteen blank spaces on the postage stamp walls, now filled with green silk. They were intended for generals who inconveniently died before they could be painted and not, as is often claimed, for generals who disgraced themselves by taking part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Alexander died on 1 December 1825 and the so-called ‘Decembrist’ revolt took place on 26 December. Only one portrait of a Decembrist was ever included in the gallery, that of Prince Sergey Volkonsky. It was banished by Alexander’s brother Nicholas in 1826 but was found in one of the palace storerooms in 1903 and restored to its place.

The Decembrist uprising was essentially a demonstration in favour of the succession passing to Alexander’s brother Constantine rather than Nicholas. The conspirators believed that Constantine would make a reformist tsar and give Russia a ‘constitution’ like those which Alexander himself had helped to establish in France and Poland after the defeat of Napoleon. A constitution, they believed, would exert a crucial restraint on autocratic power; the Decembrist Mikhail Fonvizin has left an eloquent assessment of the causes of the uprising:

The Decembrists did not know, however, that Konstantin had renounced his claim to the throne in 1819 following his marriage to a Polish woman who was not of royal birth. In 1823 Alexander had prepared a secret manifesto recognising his younger brother Nicholas as heir. In St Petersburg some 3,000 demonstrators gathered in the Senate Square around Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great on 26 December 1825 and one of the first decisions of Nicholas’s reign was to have his guards fire on them, mowing down around eighty and dispersing the rest in pandemonium. ‘Dear, dear Constantine,’ he wrote to his brother a few hours later, ‘Your will has been done. I am Emperor, but, my God, at what price! At the price of my subjects’ blood!’