Abstract
Catherine II of Russia by way of Germany has been called many things, both during her lifetime and since. No woman ruler, certainly not one beyond the boundaries of our blessed realm, has had so much written about her or been the subject of so many would-be biographies and studies that have ranged from the servilely eulogistic, through the humdrum, repetitive and derivative, to the scurrilous and pornographic. Or, indeed, attracted so many women biographers. But, as far as I can recall, she has never hitherto been dubbed ‘the Empress of Art’, which is not to say that the description is not apt and deserved, and the approach that it indicates is not fully vindicated in Susan Jaques’ substantial study, even if the ‘transformation’ of Russia smacks a bit of alchemy.
The book is organized as what one might call a ‘biography of collecting’, a chronological account of Catherine’s acquisitions from 1764, the year seen as marking her debut as a collector, and ending only with her death more than three decades later. Following the Introduction there are nine parts, each subdivided into five or six chapters that bear succinct and not always immediately decodable or informative titles. Take Part 3, ‘War and Love’, as illustrative with its six chapters entitled: ‘Queen of Feasts’, ‘Dressed to “Empress”’, ‘Peace Offerings’, ‘Crozat the Poor’, ‘The Coachman of Europe’ and ‘Tiger in the Forest’. The substance of each part/chapter is most frequently the works of art that the empress amassed by fair means or foul, using a network of European agents, Melchior Grimm and various Russian ambassadors prominent among them, to gobble up individual items or more often than not whole collections, offered for sale on the deaths of their owners or their falling on hard times or as the spoils of war. Jaques gives, often at considerable length, the contents of the collections and often indicates how their previous owners had accumulated them: the great collections of Pierre Crozat in France and of Sir Robert Walpole from Houghton Hall in Norfolk receive particularly detailed treatment. There is the obvious danger in the enumeration of so many paintings by so many artists, to say nothing of pieces of sculpture and a whole array of other objets d’art, that the reader might suffer from the sort of cultural indigestion that I felt on my first visit to the Hermitage over 50 years ago.
Catherine had, she confessed, no ear for music, no understanding of art, but she was a ‘glutton’ for collecting, far outdoing her European royal rivals. Her collectomania engendered other manias: for building and for the laying out of gardens. She brought in her European architects, Quarenghi and Cameron in the van, and some Russian ones, to enlarge and change the Winter Palace to house her Hermitage, her theatre, her winter garden and the Raphael loggia, and to do the same at the Empress Elizabeth’s other great palace at Tsarskoe Selo, but also to build completely new palaces for her own use and for her favourites within the capital and in its environs. The 1770s saw the apogee of another mania, Anglomania, that manifested itself not only in Cameron’s brand of neo-classicism but also in the commissioning of the Frog Service from Wedgwood with its depictions of English landscape gardens that to some extent she wished to see copied around her palaces through the agency of her gardeners Sparrow and Bush and Meader and Gould.
The magnitude of Catherine’s collecting is astonishing – and it extended to the acquisition of the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot (the world of books was one in which the empress was most comfortable) and Jaques is unflagging in her largely successful attempt to impress this on her readers. At the same time she was obliged to provide for her catalogue of paintings and objects and places a historical frieze or frame to remind us of other events of a political and social nature within Russia and in Europe, as well, of course, of the succession of ever younger favourites. The posthumous fate of Catherine’s possessions is addressed in the very welcome ninth and final part, ‘Legacy’, where Jaques surveys not only the ‘retributions’ of her son Paul but of succeeding Romanovs and the devastation wrought by a Soviet regime and by the great WWII siege of Catherine’s capital, right up to the contemporary worldwide Hermitage-mania, spearheaded by its director Mikhail Piotrovsky.
Jaques has a background in art history and journalism and both show, although the latter perhaps not always to her advantage. Jaques writes fluently, engagingly, and generally is able to marry two very different partners: the precise technical vocabulary often required to describe jewellery, paintings, sculptures and such like and a relaxed narrative style, although she overdoes ‘contemporary’ usage, with a predilection for verbs such as ‘out-bling’, ‘nix’, ’snag’, ‘bag’, ‘bankroll’, and pointless references to ‘Kate Middleton’ and Tony Blair. Jaques evidently lacks a knowledge of Russian, which precludes acquaintance with many pertinent sources. She has seemingly some French and German, but acknowledges the help of three translators (with no indication of the language(s) involved). Her extensive bibliography comprises only English-language works and it is fortunate that many books (if not their articles) by curators and researchers at the Hermitage in particular have appeared in English versions.
For those who are interested in such things – and I readily admit they may be in the minority, Jaques’s use of endnotes to convey the sources of her information is not reassuring. Take the Introduction as an example of what is to come. There are four passages or quotations in the text that are given endnotes. The first is from the Russian scholar G. N. Komelova, but the note does not give the title of her article, referring to a collection that presumably includes it; there follow quotations from Catherine herself (twice) and the Prince de Ligne for which the references are not to editions of their memoirs but to works edited by Nathalie Bondil and George Vilinbakhov or written by Bruce Lincoln. There is, however, a further quotation from the empress’s memoirs in the last lines which is simply left without a reference. This baffling and random procedure occurs throughout the book, especially with relation to the much quoted empress and her correspondent Melchior Grimm, although it is evident that Jaques has her favourite ‘intermediary’ sources such as Virginia Rounding’s Catherine the Great (2006) and Sebag Montefiore’s Potemkin (2001 and 2005). Such sources are not always acknowledged, however, sometimes to her own detriment: the erroneous information (p. 295) that Charles Cameron was sent to work in the Crimea at the time of the empress’s famous progress to her newly acquired territories is to be found only in Isobel Rae’s biography of the Scottish architect (1971).
Jaques’s book is a labour of love and sustained dedication. It is not the result of original archival or primary source research, but it is a very able and thorough compilation that uses the work of others in order to produce an interesting and sustained narrative. Its audience will be a wide one and will include the general reader for whom the name of Catherine is always a magnet, the earnest NADFAS members and Friends of the Hermitage and of other similar museums, galleries and institutions, and many a scholar of art and of imperial Russia.