I. Belukha and Barnaul

BY JULY 1852 the three Atkinsons had moved west, back to Barnaul in the Altai, a slow progression as they knew it was the last time they would see so many friends and Thomas inevitably wanted to go on sketching. They stayed with a friend in a house overlooking the Ob, which they found had now shrunk to much the same size as St Petersburg’s Neva, whereas the previous June it had been almost twelve versts wide from the mountains’ melting snows.

Next day, when all the mountains were white (in August), they rode to Kokshinsk, where Thomas and Lucy had stayed four years before, and were greeted with delight at the news of the ‘Barona’s’ (i.e. barinya’s or ‘lady’s’) son. Thomas was now very keen to climb Belukha (he spells it ‘Bieloukha’), the highest mountain in the Altai and indeed all Siberia, its twin summits of 4,435 and 4,506 m connected by a wide saddle. (There is a higher one, Kluchevskaya Sopka, on the Kamchatka peninsula.) On that earlier visit it had been too late in the year even to try. Now in August, ‘very anxious as the fine weather was going fast’, he was determined to attempt it, particularly since it was as yet unclimbed – and is still a sacred and indeed mystical mountain today. He set off without Lucy and Alatau over 400 miles south-south-east from Barnaul, successively by carriage, telegas and horse, and his first night away ‘slept in a dirty room. in the night I was awoke by the thunder bellowing in the Mountains but not near. tho the rain poured down. How much I should have liked to have been in our clean room and sleeping with my dear little wife’ (his underlining).

For the last stage of the journey he was accompanied by Yepta, a Kalmyk hunter, and three others. Nearing Belukha, they began by fording dangerous rapids on the Turgan and Katun rivers which had once taken the lives of fourteen Chinese. Thomas admired the Turgan valley’s ‘magnificent cedars’ intermingled with birch with their ‘rich orange and yellow tints’ and poplar varying from orange to deep crimson, while above them rose rocky ridges of brown and purple and, beyond, the Altai’s snowy summits ‘looking like frosted silver against the deep ethereal blue’.

He was kept busy with his sketches but the mountains – particularly on horseback – proved very difficult, with zigzag tracks and high perpendicular rocks, and in some places they had to descend. ‘A fine view’ of Belukha finally presented itself: ‘a stupendous mass’, its summit formed by two enormous peaks, shored up with innumerable buttresses forming ravines filled with glaciers down to the edge of precipices overhanging the Katun valley, while on the mountains’ lower spurs he found many flowers among the ‘rich short grass’: red primula, sweet-scented violet and several sorts of anemones. In ten or twelve days, he considered, they would all be covered with snow for at least nine months. Further on he collected seed. What happened to it on his return?

Mount Belukha
Siberia’s highest mountain (4,506 m), eternally snow-clad, known for its double saddle, is regarded as particularly holy by the indigenous Altaians. Thomas made two attempts to climb it but was defeated by the weather conditions, precipices and six glaciers. It was first climbed only in 1914.

That first night in his tent with the pouring rain outside he ‘thought of all our nights spent in such places. How much I wished for Lucy!’ And after only two hours’ sleep he was woken by thunder ‘and the rain pouring through his tent like a scotch mist’. The lightning soon appeared to come from the ‘top of the trees’ and ‘the thunder made the ground shake. I never heard anything to equal it before’, and this continued the whole night’.1 His journal records that he had to drink his evening tea alone, and, touchingly, ‘A mountain life is pleasant but 40 times more so with Lucy and the little man’ – a second instance of the very rare indications of his feelings towards them.2

The next day the weather worsened, a strong cold wind increased and a snowstorm began. Although increasingly concerned that they might be trapped in the mountains by a heavy fall of snow, they nevertheless continued past the source of the Katun in its mass of ice, up and down mountains towards their goal, with intermittent rain and fog and the snow-capped summits above. Thomas’s desire ‘was to see and sketch the Mountain’ and he ‘expected on gaining each summit to see it but was ever disappointed’, foiled by other high peaks. Then ‘suddenly it rose up before me without a cloud’ and from one crest ‘we had the Bielouka before us in all his grandure’. Thomas sketched four views, all, alas, lost today.

The icy glacier – one of six surrounding Belukha – coupled with the ‘mighty precipices’ several hundred feet above them, and now a snowstorm, forbade further upward progress, and after about nine days in the mountains he turned, disappointed, back to Lucy and Alatau in Barnaul. A modern trekking guidebook warns that ‘the unstable weather patterns in these parts mean that even in summer you may often find yourself in dangerous winter storm conditions’, which is exactly what had happened.3

But that autumn the three Atkinsons, reunited in Barnaul, still made excursions into the countryside. Lucy claimed:

There is no place equal to Siberia for a pic-nic, we can settle down on any spot we choose, and ramble about at will. Each lady takes it in turn to act the hostess, and forward servants with the necessary supplies to the place of encampment. These assemblies are the most joyous you can possibly conceive. The ladies start first with the children; then follow the gentlemen, when all kinds of games are played, in which the latter, old and young, join in right good earnest; casting all cares to the winds, they become children for the time, jumping, leaping, running, and dancing.

At the New Year Lucy was faced with yet more balls, concerts and theatres in Barnaul in honour of the new nachalnik (director), Colonel Stroleman, who had succeeded their friend Colonel Sokolovsky, now promoted to General. In his new position Stroleman had to give a grand ball on New Year’s Eve to the whole town – ‘a brilliant assemblage full of mirth, congratulating each other as the bells toll forth the new year … when the champagne is poured out, and there is a general kissing all round’. All the ladies had magnificent new dresses – Lucy’s was white – which had arrived by post. Unfortunately, halfway through the evening the brilliancy of the ball was literally extinguished when all the lights went out and almost total darkness reigned. The Strolemans, unprepared for the number of candles needed (usually bought at the great Irbit fair), had bought stearin candles in Barnaul, which proved to have no wicks. Fortunately, some others were found, but not nearly enough for the event, to the great disappointment of the ladies and, Lucy was to write, ‘it is said that such trivial things make up a woman’s life’ – though certainly not in her case.

Alatau celebrated his fourth birthday with a ‘grand ball’ in Barnaul. ‘All our friends, old, young, and middle-aged, came and right merrily was the evening spent.’ Lucy had intended to have only three musicians, but ‘the whole band’ arrived and Mme Stroleman sent off to her country house for a couple of dozen chairs as well as her head cook, better than Lucy’s – the first mention of Lucy’s cook – and ‘her principal waiting man; indeed each house one visits there is always the same set of servants, the one borrows of the other for every festival’.

Continuing their homeward journey west, the Atkinsons arrived in Ekaterinburg in the Urals ‘just in time for the [Easter] carnival’ and were welcomed warmly by all their old friends, but the church bells nearby ‘never ceased during the whole of Easter week’.

The grandest ball at Easter was given by General Glinka who, in Siberian style, walked round his guests rather than sitting with them, attending to their needs. Lucy sat next to a friend of the general’s, ‘a comely lady of fifty, extremely amusing and good natured’; she had recently married an elderly man who had had to be carried up the stairs to the church and sit during the wedding ceremony and had such ‘repugnant’ eating habits that his wife ate alone. She told Lucy that she had married ‘simply to give me a position in society; for even at my age I am obliged to be very circumspect … am fond of cards, and enjoy society amazingly’. She could, she said, now come and go as she pleased with no one thinking it improper, had enough money of her own and wanted nothing from her husband but a position. Furthermore, she devoted herself to his daughter, forgoing much ‘to accompany her into society’, and now she was to be married. The Atkinsons were surprised (and amused) to hear of the English mechanics now living in Ekaterinburg, struggling to outvie each other in magnificence and ostentation.

They left the Great Post Road on their way further west to say goodbye to the Decembrists at Yalutorovsky. It took three days as their friends had ‘a thousand questions … about their comrades, from whom they had been separated for years.… What a welcome we met with! As for the little mountain [Alatau], he was nearly devoured.’ The next day they visited a school for both boys and girls set up by the exiles, where drawing was taught on paper but writing taught on a level of sand atop the desks. One of the exiles they encountered was the old Vasily (Wilhelm Sigismund von) Tiesenhausen, who was very excited as he had just learned he had been pardoned after twenty-eight years of exile – ‘he could think and speak of nothing else but his return to his wife’. The few days he had to wait were ‘as irksome to him’ as his many years of exile. Much later the Atkinsons heard that, after the first meeting with his wife in Courland (today’s Latvia), he became dissatisfied, finding her appearance much altered and ‘no companionship in her society’, having grown apart after so long; he had become ‘just as anxious to return to Siberia as he was to leave it’, deprived of his old companions in exile.

While in Yalutorovsky a young British naval officer and his wife arrived en route to his ship at Okhotsk on the Pacific coast. She dreaded the long journey ahead and believed she would die. Lucy tried to comfort her – in vain. When the couple left, the naval husband was unfavourably compared to Thomas, and their friends still remembered years after their first visit ‘with what care and attention I [Lucy] had been placed in the sledge, and covered up … whereas she, poor woman, had to get in herself, without assistance’. They agreed that Russian men ‘were far behind Englishmen in the care of their wives’ and Thomas and Lucy found ‘a snugness and comfort’ in their sledge which the naval pair did not comprehend.

They carried on to Irbit to see the famous fair, attended by people from all over the world, with many different costumes and languages. Almost everything imaginable was on sale, including the piles and piles of iron-bound, mostly red, boxes, which the Atkinsons had seen in every peasant’s house, containing their treasures. It was surprising how many people they met at the fair whom they knew, some from the Kazakh steppe who recognised them ‘and screamed out ‘“Aman!” meaning “Good day”’.

In early June they stopped south of Ekaterinburg at the Sysertsky Zavod ironworks to be shown over the extensive hothouses and their ‘magnificent collection of plants’ by the owner, Mr Salemerskoi. Further south just outside Zlatoust they came across an encampment of some two hundred peasants on their way to Siberia to start a new village. Lucy noted it was not unusual to find entire villages only recently abandoned by order of the authorities. The Atkinsons wandered round looking for scenes for Thomas to sketch, encountering for the first time Bashkir4 men and women alike in sheepskin coats and trousers, their dwellings ‘in a most wretched condition’ and the inhabitants ‘ever dirtier and more dissipated near town or priisks’.

They now waited for ‘good winter roads to start for St Petersburg’, where they hoped to join their friends for Christmas, and Lucy thought:

II. St Petersburg

Their arrival in St Petersburg on Christmas Eve 1853 was certainly well timed. It was six years since the pair had set off, and now there were three of them. We can imagine that they went straight to the house of General Muravyov and his family, where they would have had so much to say, not least because so many of the Decembrists they had seen were relatives and friends; and the General, as a founder member of the Russian Geographical Society (now ‘Imperial’ as of 1850), would have been particularly interested in their travels. Sofia, Lucy’s erstwhile charge, would now have become a young lady of twenty. She and Lucy would have been delighted to see each other again after so long – and, of course, there was the young Alatau too.

Thomas is thought to have brought his large watercolours back in great rolls. On the last day of the year he wrote to Nicholas I for the third time, informing him that he had returned after nearly seven years away, reminding the Tsar of his gracious permission and the purpose of the travels. Now, having made very many sketches and collected ‘much material for a picturesque description’ of that area, he solicited the Tsar’s permission to remain in St Petersburg under his Imperial Majesty’s protection ‘for four or five years in order to prepare my work for publication’. It is not at all clear what sort of book he had in mind: the extensively illustrated 600-page volume that he ultimately produced or a folio of colour plates with brief descriptions. But why did he need as much as ‘four or five years’? (And how could he afford that, other than by selling many watercolours?) A reply from the Emperor appears not to exist, but at all events the Atkinsons were still in St Petersburg three and a half years later.

After the Christmas and New Year festivities were over the three settled in ‘10 [i.e. 10th] Line, House Gutschow’ on Vasilyevsky Island, facing across the river the fashionable English Embankment, where in the English church Alatau was baptised in early February by the British Minister (doubtless after no little discussion of the chosen names). Sofia stood as sponsor together with two British expatriates, J. Lumley Savile and Edward Cayley.5

We must suppose that Lucy, daughter of a schoolmaster and herself an ex-governess, would have been teaching Alatau, now five, and that Thomas would have started (or continued) writing his first book, turning preliminary sketches into watercolours, but first preparing a selection for the Emperor. His journals had ended with his travels and neither he nor Lucy included their subsequent stay in St Petersburg in their future books, but happily we have Thomas’s correspondence in the capital: the letters he received and some copies of those he sent, passed down through his descendants.6

From them we know that Thomas visited the British Embassy shortly after his return, for in mid-January Sir Hamilton Seymour, the British Ambassador, wrote to Lord Clarendon, Foreign Secretary, in London, regarding Russia’s ‘advance in India’, and reported that Atkinson was glad to make information available to Her Majesty’s Government but anxious not to be credited, as his ‘literary and scientific pursuits’ (scientific?) necessitated ‘some years longer in Russia’.7 This letter must surely refute the notion that Thomas was a British spy.

In March 1854 the Crimean War began and at once ‘a barrier of ice’ went up (in St Petersburg at least), separating the Russians and the British, even close friends. Many British employees of Russian firms lost their jobs and ‘Those swines the English’ was a common expression. But of this we hear nothing in the Atkinsons’ three books, not even a mention of the war. Relations fortunately recovered quickly with the peace, almost exactly two years later.8

In late April Thomas wrote to Alexander von Humboldt, reminding him of his valuable letter of introduction to Admiral Lütke. He told Humboldt in a few words of his seven years’ exploration and sketches and, specifically, the extinct volcano that he had discovered. We do not know if there was a reply.

However, he does acknowledge in his first book the help of Baroness Edith von Rahden and Miss Euler, ‘a worthy descendant’ of the outstanding eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707–1783; he had lived a few doors from the Atkinsons’ residence, as a plaque today testifies). They were both ladies-in-waiting – and Miss Euler probably the entrée for the Atkinsons – to the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, unhappily married to the Grand Duke Michael, the Tsar’s younger brother, who cared only for the army. Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg in 1807, Elena Pavlovna was beautiful, charming and intelligent and, unlike her husband, interested in the arts and good causes. She founded the St Petersburg Conservatoire as well as the earliest version of Russia’s Red Cross and a nursing order for Russian troops in the Crimean War (vide Florence Nightingale), and took an important role in the emancipation of the serfs.

She liked to gather in her Thursday salons ‘all that was then the cream of St Petersburg wit, scholarship and talent: learned men … and statesmen’.9 But she never permitted any familiarity and protocol forbade her from being the hostess on such non-official occasions, either in the magnificent palace still known by her husband’s name as the Mikhailovsky Palace – now the Russian Museum – or, after his death, in her splendid palace on Kamenny Island10 where the Atkinsons were to attend on her ‘with his drawings’.11 Presiding for her officially at these salons would be her principal lady-in-waiting, the Baroness von Rahden, a fellow-German, ‘intelligent and cultured’ and ‘one of the most remarkable women of her age … [with]: a great strength of will … [and] a brilliant and enlightened mind’.12

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1862
The aunt and good friend of the next Tsar, Alexander II, she was a conduit to Tsar Nicholas, to whom Thomas was keen to sell his paintings.

Thomas and Lucy were invited to her salon, doubtless as interesting people, an important step for him as in January 1855 (despite the Crimean War) he ‘had the honour’ to lay his views ‘before her Imperial Highness who was pleased to say that they had afforded her much pleasure and that at some future time she wished to see the others’,13 and the same month Thomas was requested to bring his pictures to the Grand Duchess in two days’ time.14 That was obviously a success, as five days later Miss Euler wrote asking Thomas to take his drawings to the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Adlerberg, at the Winter Palace: ‘His Majesty the Emperor will see them at one o’clock.’15 This was thrilling news for Thomas, who must have longed for this and must have been working on a selection of his watercolours that he hoped to show to the Tsar.

However, next month Adlerberg16 wrote to him that, although the Tsar had now seen his pictures and ‘was much pleased, [he] did not consent to purchase them’, which must have been a great disappointment. Thomas replied the next day, saying that, since he wished to exhibit seventy-three he had finished before sending them to England, he hoped that the Tsar would ‘graciously condescend to permit me to say that the few which have been laid before’ him gave satisfaction, to which Adlerberg replied, authorising Thomas to state that the pictures ‘had [indeed] met with His Imperial Majesty’s approbation’.17 This somewhat qualified success was just in time, for four days later Nicholas died unexpectedly of pneumonia.

All would have been very subdued in St Petersburg with court mourning, but Thomas must have kept busy with his large watercolours and perhaps his book too. In July 1855 he received a letter from Lord Bloomfield, who had been secretary and then envoy in St Petersburg from 1844 and subsequently ambassador in Berlin from 1851. Bloomfield thanked Atkinson for his letter and sketch of Chinese Tartary, delivered in Berlin to his wife, who was ‘greatly pleased with the drawing’ of ‘thoroughly remarkable scenery’,18 and two months later Bloomfield’s office wrote saying they would be forwarding the parcel expected from Winsor & Newton, doubtless keenly awaited. This cannot have been the first time that he needed new watercolours.

It was not until February of 1856 that Thomas, probably in despair after the long silence from the Grand Duchess’s two ladies-in-waiting, braved protocol by writing to the Grand Duchess herself via the Baroness, hoping she ‘would pardon him for daring to intrude upon her’, to say that when she had seen some of his small pictures of Siberia she had ‘most kindly condescended to say’ that she would ‘visit his collection and see his larger works’. Since then he had finished twelve large pictures of ‘the most magnificent scenery of Siberia, Mongolia and Chinese Tartary’19 – three of them ‘of colossal dimensions … such as have never been attempted by any artist’,20 and he hoped that her Imperial Highness would ‘still condescend to visit the collection’.21

But a few days later in a short note22 to Baroness von Rahden, he deeply regretted that the Grand Duchess had been ill, so would with great pleasure take his pictures to the palace whenever convenient to her. In March he was finally able to have an audience with her to show his sketches and another in May to show his large pictures. Presumably he used the opportunity to ask her deferentially to forward a letter to the new Tsar, Alexander II, her nephew and close friend, as the next month he heard from Baroness von Rahden that ‘the Grand Duchess Helen has instantly forwarded your letter to His Majesty the Emperor’.23 The Baroness hoped Thomas was already informed of the Tsar’s wish to see his pictures, ending with her best wishes for his ‘success in this affair’.24

His letter to Alexander recalled that ‘His Late Imperial Majesty was most graciously pleased’ to permit him to travel to Siberia in order to sketch the scenery, and explained that he had devoted seven years to his journey, producing ‘a great number of sketches’ and collecting ‘a vast mass of material for a picturesque description’. He had, he wrote, spent more than two years since his return preparing his work for publication and had ‘completed the illustrations for two volumes, also, many large pictures’, stressing again the size. He greatly hoped that they would interest the Emperor ‘as they are from regions never before sketched or even visited by any European’.25 And he now prayed for permission to dedicate his work to the Emperor ‘as a token of my profound respect’ – it was forthcoming – and hoped he might be permitted to submit these views personally ‘and … point out some of the Grand features of your Imperial Majesty’s mighty Empire’. He then made another request:

This has already been a work of great labour and expense, and very often of most severe privations, and will still take up most of the remaining years of my life. I now pray your Imperial Majesty to grant me the permission to receive the paper, colours, glass, and other materials requisite to continue my work Free of Duty as this presses very heavy upon me: already it has cost me more than five hundred roubles silver.

And he added further that as artists were often absolved from paying the Custom House dues and he was now devoting all his energies to complete his work on Siberia, he sincerely hoped and prayed that the Emperor ‘will graciously condescend to allow the amount of Duty I have paid to be returned to me’.26

But it seems that Thomas’s request for compensation was never granted. However, as a man of drive and determination he tried his luck again with Elena Pavlovna through the Baroness. He called on the latter in April but she was out. He wrote three weeks later explaining that he hoped for an interview with the Grand Duchess, sincerely hoped that her health had recovered and was now the more anxious to lay his pictures before her ‘as the navigation will shortly open’ when he can send his works to England. Shortly afterwards he heard from Count Alexander Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1793–1866), formerly the Grand Duchess’s equerry and now Lord Steward of the Imperial Court,27 that the Tsar had ‘graciously expressed a wish’ to see his drawings and watercolour paintings. Thomas thanked the Count the next day, although he thought the Tsar could not be aware of their large dimensions,28 impossible to put on a table. Thomas added that he had a frame for each size, so could change them in a minute as he could for the illustrations for the first two volumes (was he really contemplating more?) of his work on Siberia, i.e. fifty-eight drawings completed. He humbly prayed that the Emperor would name a day when Thomas might submit them himself at the Winter Palace.29

The Atkinsons’ apartment block in St Petersburg

Four days later he wrote to Tolstoy announcing that he had placed his pictures in the Winter Palace as instructed, and a month later (20 July) wrote again regarding the Emperor’s ‘gracious condescension to receive him’ which he had hoped would be soon owing to the forthcoming coronation (in early September). He apologised for intruding at this time, and ‘nothing but absolute necessity would have induced me to do so … I am no longer a young man and this work will still take many years to complete. This makes me count every month as it passes with intense anxiety.’

On 30 July he wrote again to the Tsar, thanking him for permission to submit his watercolours personally, but he now feared that the matter ‘may have escaped your Imperial Majesty’s reccolection’ and hoped that the Tsar might permit Thomas to dedicate his book to him. Fortunately, that permission was forthcoming in early August, but he seems to have given up the hope of showing the Emperor his watercolours except after his return from London. He had expected every day to be summoned, and the moment he had the date he would, he wrote to the Baroness, prepare his departure, and prayed she would not deem him ungentlemanly in mentioning his one picture bought by the Grand Duchess. ‘This small matter [of 250 roubles silver] has no doubt escaped Her Imperial Highness’ reccollection’ and he asked the Baroness to arrange payment without giving offence and deeply regretted troubling her.30

In those two years in St Petersburg Thomas was in touch not just with the Romanov ruling family but with leading noble families, judging from two surviving letters, one from a Sheremetev, another from a Dolgoruky. In addition, Count Esterhazy of the old Hungarian noble family requested the pleasure of calling at the Atkinson residence with some friends ‘in order to admire Mr Atkinson’s Siberian album’.31 An ‘E. Liprandis’, perhaps Ivan Petrovich Liprandi, ‘secret service officer, major general of Spanish and Italian descent’,32 noted duellist and friend of Pushkin, sent Thomas four letters, so much gratified and delighted by ‘your beautiful collection of pictures’ that he wished to buy ‘the Baikal View (the one by Moonlight which [we] admired so much)’; he sent Thomas 250 silver roubles, which he understood was the price, and on its arrival spent ‘an hour admiring it’.33

One of the friends the Atkinsons made in St Petersburg was a young member of the small American colony, Andrew Dickson White, attaché for six months (1854–5) to the American Minister and later not only Minister twice himself but co-founder of Cornell University and its first president for nearly two decades. His St Petersburg journal has eight brief references to the Atkinsons – generally ‘called upon’ or ‘dined with’, but in his autobiography he was to write:

As to Russian matters it was my good fortune to become intimately acquainted with Atkinson, the British traveler in Siberia. He had brought back many portfolios of sketches and his charming wife had treasured up a great fund of anecdotes of people and adventure so that I deemed for a time to know Siberia as if I had lived there. The Atkinsons had also brought back their only child, a son born on the Siberian steppe, a wonderfully bright youngster. He bore a name which I fear may at times have proved a burden to him, for his father and mother were so delighted with the place that they called him after it, Alatau Taur Chiboulak.34

On 19 August 1856, before he sailed for England, Thomas wrote to the British Ambassador in St Petersburg, Lord Wodehouse (later 1st Earl of Kimberley), sincerely thanking him for his great kindness in giving him letters of introduction to Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon, respectively. We do not know why he wanted them but ‘I am sure they will be of great value to me’. He said he had packed up seventy of his pictures to take to London but would leave many in St Petersburg as Lucy (and presumably Alatau) would remain, and he intended to return ‘by the last steamer in October’. If, he added, ‘any of your Lordship’s friends feel an interest in the scenery from these distant Regions my rooms are ever open to them’. And he took up the case of a compatriot, Mr [John] Gullett, ‘who is now doing much good to the people of Siberia by establishing these [unspecified] machine works’, requesting the Ambassador to bring the affair to the Minister’s notice at a more convenient period than the impending coronation, so ‘rendering a very important Service to a most deserving and honest man’.35

We imagine that Thomas returned to England ahead of his family in order to expedite publication of his views or even his book, but he evidently failed, either on this or his final departure, to provide ‘the usual formal Guarantee’ for a passport and did not bring the sum required, despite a letter from Lord Wodehouse. He must have wondered what the future held for him back in his native land, after so many years, so many adventures so far away and so many watercolours: fame and if possible fortune too?

When the three returned together their, surely, considerable luggage would have included the big rolls of his paintings, the sketch-books of his many drawings, his journals, geologically interesting rock specimens, ‘a variety of extremely beautiful vases and cut gems from Ekaterinburg’, which would be exhibited at a scientific and literary party at the Royal Society, a rubashka or Russian peasant-style shirt and even a handsome brass samovar.