by Simon Dixon
As this letter shows, Rastrelli’s Baroque interiors were also transformed in these years. Once the main staircase had been moved in 1778 from the southern end of the palace to the centre where it now stands, Catherine had the southern wing converted into a series of cool, neoclassical rooms, no longer extant. Cameron produced at least three variations for the décor of the Lyon room, ultimately said to have cost 201,250 roubles, or £40,250, not including the lapis lazuli. Measuring thirty-six by thirty-two feet, the room was twenty-eight feet high and took its name from the French silks hanging between twelve mirrors, thirteen feet long by four feet wide. It was almost complete by the time the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of September 1781. Three further apartments were already finished: the Chinese room, decorated ‘with prodigious fine China jarrs’; the Arabesque room, where Catherine was to enjoy countless games of cards and chess; and her tiny study, which appeared to Elizabeth Dimsdale ‘like an enchanted place, the sides of it inlaid with foil red and green so that it dazzled ones eyes to look at it’.100 Equally delighted by Cameron’s ‘superlative’ interiors, the ever-competitive empress announced to Grimm that ‘no one has seen anything to match them: I can tell you that I have done nothing but look at them for the last nine weeks’.101 Paul’s departure for Vienna allowed Cameron to start on his northern part of the palace, between the staircase and the chapel. ‘Every Sunday I pass your apartments,’ Catherine reported to Maria Fëdorovna shortly after her fifty-third birthday in 1782, ‘which currently have neither windows nor doors and are full of workmen.’102
The grand duchess was even keener to hear of progress at the new palace at nearby Pavlovsk, the estate presented to the heir on the birth of his first son. There was still snow on the ground when Catherine made an impromptu visit on 29 April, much to the alarm of the steward, who had only recently taken delivery of 3.5 million bricks. Catching up with the empress while she was still inside the house, he accompanied her on a characteristically demanding tour of the park:
From the ruin Her Majesty wanted to go down to the right of the temple where the paths are not yet made… I prayed M. Nelidinsky to go by a better path but Her Majesty wished to continue… Before arriving [at the cascade] she asked several questions about the water, which I had to answer as no one could explain it sufficiently to Her Majesty. She stopped a moment at the cascade, and passed to the chalet, asking me questions from time to time. She sat a moment at the chalet and asked me several questions about the colonnade then took the path to the edge of the garden.103
‘Building is a devilish thing,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm in one of her periodic excursions into her native German. ‘It devours money, and the more one builds, the more one wants to go on. It is a sickness, like drinking, and a sort of habit.’104 So powerful was that habit that it was not only her favourite summer palace that she had ‘turned upside down, so to speak’:
You wouldn’t recognise my bedroom here in town…I used to have a niche: I have it no longer. My bed is facing the windows and, so that I don’t have the light in my eyes, there is a mirror facing the windows at the foot of the bed, under which is a canopy that barely covers the bed. On both sides of the bed, I have some banquettes which go around the alcove. It’s charming, and this invention by your humble servant is currently being adopted in all the houses in Petersburg. Besides, my bed is not at all in the imperial style: it has only curtains.105
Much more in the imperial style was the empress’s growing art collection. When Potëmkin first took Corberon to the Hermitage in January 1776, he found ‘a lot of pictures, badly displayed’:
The gallery is too narrow; there is not enough space to see them and the windows don’t reach high enough, or rather, they descend too low. These are ordinary casements, unlike those in the gallery at Kassel. Here I noticed, with sorrow, Greuze’s Paralytic: it has lost its colour and its effect; it is diminished now.106
The answer was to build a bigger gallery—the Large Hermitage—and to keep on making acquisitions to fill it. Catherine’s most significant purchase in these years was from the bankrupt descendants of Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall, where a formal portrait of the empress, offered in part exchange, still dominates the saloon. The Walpole collection, which included Rembrandt’s Abraham and Isaac, was so important that John Wilkes had proposed to Parliament that it be purchased from public funds as the basis for a new National Gallery. George Walpole, the third earl, had other ideas. As Horace Walpole reported in December 1778, ‘the mad master’ had ‘sent his final demand of forty-five thousand pounds to the Empress of Russia’. In the end, she paid £40,555 in a sale negotiated by her ambassador in London. ‘Russia is sacking our palaces and museums,’ moaned Josiah Wedgwood.107
Despite her support for the Imperial Academy of Arts at St Petersburg, Russian painters scarcely figured in her collection. For the lucky neoclassical artists who impressed her foreign agents—Grimm in Paris and Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in Rome—Catherine’s patronage offered a potential bonanza. Anton Raphael Mengs was already approaching the end of a life of service to the Courts of Dresden and Madrid when she first expressed interest in his work in 1776. By the time Perseus and Andromeda (1777) arrived in the Hermitage, shortly after the departure of Joseph II, he had been dead for a year. ‘The fever takes hold of me, too, when I think of the state Mengs is in,’ Catherine told Grimm during the artist’s final illness. ‘I hope all the great men of our century are not destined to die before the year 1780.’108 Clérisseau, whose drawings of Rome arrived in the same consignment as the Mengs, was still very much alive, having recovered from his earlier embarrassment to trade so openly on the empress’s fondness for his work that a scandal erupted when Paul inadvertently snubbed him in Paris.109 It was there that Alexander Stroganov showed off the bust of Catherine commissioned from Jean-Antoine Houdon. She herself had ordered a bust of Voltaire, whose death in 1778 at the beginning of her infatuation for Rimsky-Korsakov had made her feel ‘a very great contempt for all the things of this world’.110 All Europe echoed Jeremy Bentham’s mock awe at her well-publicised aspiration to build a replica of Ferney: ‘Kitty you will find is going to erect a monument to him, in the middle of Petersburgh and to have a model of his house in her park at Czarskozelo.’111 In the end, she settled for buying his library for the Hermitage. It arrived in 1779, seven years before Diderot’s books finally made their way to St Petersburg, to be placed in the care of A. I. Luzhkov, still not thirty, who had translated the Encyclopédie article on ‘political economy’ for Catherine’s Society of Translators.112 Yet by no means all her purchases pleased her. Returning to town with the newly inoculated grand dukes in September 1781, shortly after their parents’ departure for Vienna, Catherine complained to Grimm about the latest delivery from Rome. It was if the rain had somehow obscured her vision:
To my great astonishment, except for the Mengs and a few other trifles, all the rest, except for the Raphael loggias, are nasty daubs: I have told Martinelli, the painter who takes care of my gallery, to choose [the best] and send the daubs to auction for the benefit of the civic hospital. Heavens above! It is incredible how the divine one [Reiffenstein] has allowed himself to go wrong this time: I beg you to ask him expressly to buy no more from Monsieur Jenkins. It is scandalous to pass off such banalities under the name of this or the other painter. My guests at the Hermitage were ashamed to go in there ahead of me.113
Some reasonably assumed that there must be no end to Catherine’s resources. When a French craftsman set his price in 1776 for a writing desk to commemorate the victory at Chesme, Grimm thought the sum ‘so ridiculous’ that he expected the deal to be cancelled. Yet, as he later explained to the French foreign minister, ‘it turned out otherwise. The empress, who likes to encourage artists in extraordinary projects—and who perhaps intended this escritoire as a mark of her munificence—ordered me to have it done.’114 In reality, even Catherine’s budget was overstretched. In 1778, she had her ambassador in Paris commission a 744-pie
ce Sèvres service. (It was a gift for ‘my dear, beloved Prince Potëmkin, but so that it should be all the finer, I have said that it is for me’.) Each plate was priced at 242 livres, the sugar bowls at 1410 livres, and the liqueur decanter at 2236 livres, making a grand total of 328,188 livres (roughly 41,000 roubles at the rate of exchange given by Bentham in June 1778). But when it emerged in the following year that the full amount had not been paid, part of the service was held back in compensation and it was not until 1857 that officials acting on behalf of her youngest grandson, Nicholas I, acquired the missing pieces.115 The tension between ambition and economy remained unresolved in many of Catherine’s commissions. No one was to learn this sooner than Giacomo Quarenghi, one of two Italians recommended by Grimm in 1779 when the empress complained that Rinaldi and her other architects were ‘too old, or too blind, or too slow, or too lazy, or too young, or too slothful, or too much the grand seigneur, or too rich, or too respectable, or too stale’.116 Having been ordered to design new bronze doors for her bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo in 1784, Quarenghi warned Betskoy that ‘although Her Majesty desires that these doors should be as sumptuous as possible, if Your Excellency finds the price rising too high, bronze could be used only for the locks and the doorframes’.117 Most of his subsequent designs were supplied with alternative specifications, allowing for variations in cost.
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It had cost Catherine more than 7 million roubles to keep Khan Shagin Girey on the Crimean throne since 1774 and by the end of the decade she was beginning to question the value of her investment. The revolt that broke out in the khanate in the winter of 1780–81 threatened to topple her handsome puppet altogether. By May 1782, he had been forced to flee to the Russian port of Kerch, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov. After Potëmkin had been sent to quell the rebellion on 1 September, Catherine outlined the clearest statement so far of the ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II contemplating joint Austro-Russian action to deliver Europe from the Turk. But there was no hope of achieving her grandest ambitions just yet. Though her partner returned from the Crimea in late October convinced of the need for outright annexation—diplomats noticed that he was now a man with a mission—Catherine remained hesitant, anxious about the reaction of rival powers. She was brought round to his way of thinking in the spring of 1783. So long as France and Britain were paralysed by the War of American Independence, Russia had little to fear. The preliminary peace the two powers had signed in January was an added incentive not to delay. On 8 April, the empress issued a manifesto signalling her intention to annexe the strategically significant peninsula. That same month, her partner returned to the South, exasperating her this time by his prevarication. ‘I expected that the Crimea would be occupied by the middle of May,’ she complained, ‘and now here we are in the middle of July and I know nothing more about it than the Pope in Rome.’118
She did not have long to wait. Five days before this impatient letter was written, Potëmkin had already secured the prize. As usual, his jubilation was soon followed by physical collapse, prompting renewed anxieties in Catherine’s heart. It was to be November before he returned to St Petersburg. There, far from receiving a hero’s welcome, he found that his triumphs had merely intensified his rivals’ jealousies. Their resentments seemed to affect the empress, who treated him with unanticipated coolness. From then on, he was to spend more and more time in the South. On 2 February 1784, Catherine appointed him Governor General of the new province of the Tauride, incorporating the former Crimean khanate. The tensions between her and the prince were partially resolved by a division of spoils which made him the effective ruler of some of the most productive lands in her empire.
No sooner had this crucial relationship been resolved than another old friendship, potentially no less difficult to handle, was reignited. After a long period of residence in Europe, during which her son had studied at the University of Edinburgh, Princess Dashkova returned to St Petersburg. Her reception at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July 1782 marked the beginning of a renaissance at Court that lasted, with varying degress of intensity, for the remainder of the decade.119 On 24 January 1783 Dashkova was unexpectedly named as director of the Academy of Sciences in succession to the ineffectual Sergey Domashnëv. As Isabel de Madariaga has written, ‘it was a tribute to Catherine’s perception and to her disregard for current prejudices, that she appointed a woman to take charge of an institution regarded as a male preserve. It was also a way of keeping a busybody busy.’120 Lacking nothing in nerve and determination, Dashkova set to work with her customary tactless vim. Led into the hall by the mathematician Leonhard Euler, the most distinguished scientist to work in eighteenth-century Russia, then in the final year of his life, she presided over her first meeting less than a week after her appointment. It took all the organisational ability she could muster to tackle the Academy’s mounting debts, revitalise its publishing activity, organise public lectures and reform its creaking administration.121 Impressed by the rapid results, Catherine appointed her later in the year to preside over a new Russian Academy tasked with producing a dictionary of the Russian language (its first six volumes were published between 1789 and 1794). It was in Dashkova’s new journal, The Companion of Lovers of Russian Literature (1783–4), that the empress published her first essays on Russian history, a subject that was to remain a more or less constant preoccupation for the rest of her life. But it was too much to hope that Dashkova’s return would be trouble free. It was not long before her ambitions for her son put her at loggerheads with Alexander Lanskoy.
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En route to Mogilëv in 1780, Cobenzl had reassured Joseph II that Lanskoy belonged to ‘that species of favourite, who are frequently subject to change, have no influence on affairs, and who limit themselves to making their fortune and that of all those who belong to them’.122 The twenty-two-year-old major general certainly relished the trappings of office, strutting about at Court ‘dressed most magnificently with a shoulder knot of fine brilliant diamonds’. True to form, he ‘leapt like a hind’ when he learned that Gustav III planned to invest him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star.123 To Catherine, however, the dashing young Sashinka was no mere trinket. Her relationship with him was the closest she came to repeating her experience with Grigory Orlov, except that Lanskoy lacked Orlov’s streak of ruthless courage and both she and Potëmkin always treated him like a child in a gilded cage.
After Catherine’s roller-coaster ride with Potëmkin—‘the leading nail-biter in the universe’124—life with Sasha Lanskoy must have seemed reassuringly undemanding. It was certainly less competitive. Catherine’s illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, who paid regular visits to the Winter Palace during his time at the Cadet Corps, caught the prevailing balance of power in a note on a game of billiards in 1782: ‘She won the game, then started another one and began to win again. She told me to finish the game for her, and I won it.’125 Dashkova recalled a scene in which a petulant favourite allegedly tried to deter the empress from giving her a treasured bust he regarded as his own: ‘“But this bust is mine,” exclaimed Lanskoy in protest. “It belongs to me.”’126 Sasha, however, was a ‘golden individual’, accustomed to such ‘sacrifices’. It was presumably easier to regard them with equanimity when Quarenghi was not only designing a house for him at Sofia, but also working on a grandiose palace at Velë, the estate Catherine had bought for him in Pskov province. Sent there to plan the park, the Scot James Meader, who had designed the English Park at Peterhof, found that ‘the spot where the gardens are to be is very fine laid & planted by nature so that it only wants a little polishing & planting to complete it’.127 Lanskoy was just as keen to share the empress’s passion for engraved gemstones. She tried to stimulate his literary interests, too. As the sceptical French chargé noted in September 1780, ‘He has just been bought a library for 10,000 roubles, which he certainly will not read.’128
Lanskoy’s support was more emotional than intellectual. As she approached her mid-fifties, Cathe
rine faced the loss of some of her closest companions. When she learned of General Bauer’s fatal illness in the autumn of 1782, she complained to Dr Rogerson that ‘there was scarcely a doctor who knew how to cure even the bite of a bed-bug’. Bauer’s death on 11 February prompted ‘great floods of tears for many days’.129 Though the carnival continued all around her—3130 nobles and merchants attended the masked ball at the Winter Palace on 17 February—it was almost three weeks before the empress could bear to break the news to Grimm, a sure sign of the depression which often afflicted her at times of personal despair.130 Before making her annual confession at the end of the first week of the Great Fast, she quipped bleakly to her souffre-douleur that the ‘bovine medics’ had seen off ‘yet another person who has been close to me for thirty-three years’. Only Monsieur Tom, a favourite greyhound, was safe—‘he who has no use for any doctor’.131 At the end of March, Panin, who had had ‘one foot in the grave’ since his sacking in 1781, finally breathed his last. And worse was to come. Since the autumn, the empress had been nursing Grigory Orlov, whose descent into insanity after the death of his wife disturbed all who witnessed it. ‘One cannot see him in this state without pity,’ Zavadovsky admitted.132 Refusing to have her patient confined, Catherine tended him with unfailing compassion. ‘His wild and incoherent discourse ever affect her to tears,’ Harris learned, ‘and discompose her so entirely, that for the remainder of the day she can enjoy neither pleasure nor business.’133 Though the end, when it came in Moscow on 11 April, was a blessed release, it was no less shocking for that. On hearing the news at Tsarskoye Selo just before her fifty-fourth birthday, Catherine confessed ‘the most acute affliction’ to Grimm. In Orlov, she had lost ‘a friend and the man to whom I have the greatest obligations in the world… General Lanskoy is tearing himself apart to help me bear my grief, but that makes me melt even more.’134 ‘It has been a black year for me,’ she admitted to Potëmkin when Field Marshal Golitsyn went to his grave in October: ‘It seems that whoever falls into Rogerson’s hands is already a dead man.’135