Catherine the Great (45 page)

As if to symbolise her indomitable drive, Catherine finally unveiled Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great on 7 August 1782, a hundred years after his accession to the throne. Only the clergy were absent, perhaps still smarting that the Church had been unable to register its objections to the superhuman figure, twice as big as the tsar himself.
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‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto, inscribed in Latin on the west-facing side of the pedestal and in Russian on the side facing east. Harris grasped the unspoken comparison immediately: ‘I could not avoid, during this ceremony, reflecting how impossible it was that any successor of Her Imperial Majesty who might, in some future day, erect a statue in commemoration of her great actions, ever should be so much superior to her, as she herself is superior to Peter the Great, both in the art of governing, and in that of making her people respected and happy.’
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If Tsar Peter remained the single most powerful symbol of Russia’s superhuman potential, then the great flood of 1777 had offered a salutary reminder of the fragility of man’s triumph over nature. Woken by a gale at five o’clock on the morning of 10 September, Catherine gazed out from the Hermitage onto a scene resembling ‘the destruction of Jerusalem’.
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Rising almost eleven feet above its normal level, the swollen Neva had dumped a fleet of merchant vessels onto the
embankment, leaving a forest of tangled masts prey to scavengers for timber. It subsequently emerged that the storm had felled hundreds of trees at both the Summer Palace and Peterhof; the Winter Palace cellars were flooded and its roof damaged; and dozens of the capital’s grandest buildings were severely disfigured.
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Though her first thought had been to summon her sentries to safety, more than a hundred of Catherine’s subjects lost their lives that night. ‘Where am I going to put the 100 gaolbirds taken prisoner by the water?’ she mused to Potëmkin. ‘In the House of Quarantine, I say, but I don’t know whether it is strong enough. The canals are alive, and fifteen faithful soldiers have sunk into them.’
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Even as it overflowed, the river was gradually being enclosed by granite embankments designed by Georg Veldten. Begun in 1763, this extraordinary project had reached the Summer Garden by 1770 but was still incomplete in 1777. Four years later, as her carriage snaked between the boulders littering the English Embankment, Elizabeth Dimsdale expressed a common prejudice by doubting that it would ever be finished: ‘the Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit and for a little time go on very rapidly, then leave for some other object’.
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She did Catherine an injustice. In January 1780, the empress had charged General Bauer with dredging and redecorating the Fontanka with a budget of 2,372,650 roubles, payable in ten annual instalments. By 1787, much of the canal had been clad in stone under her watchful eye, despite a disconcerting demonstration by 400 peasant labourers, protesting against the miseries imposed on them by the merchant contractor.
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Ultimately, only the Admiralty wharf interrupted an elegant promenade stretching ten feet above the normal water line for several miles along the left bank of the Neva. Widely admired as ‘one of the most sumptuous ornaments of the city’, the embankment was praised by foreign visitors as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.
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Classical models were no less prominent in Catherine’s mind in planning the redesign of Tsarskoye Selo, where she had advertised her intention ‘to summarise the age of the Caesars, the Augustuses, the Ciceros and such patrons as Maecenas and to create a building where it would be possible to find all these people in one’.
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In 1773, she had hoped that Charles-Louis Clérisseau would draw on his long residence in Rome to design a classical
maison du jardin
, but he disappointed her by proposing a gargantuan structure on the scale of Bazhenov’s abortive plans for the Moscow Kremlin.
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The architect ultimately entrusted with her dreams was Charles Cameron, a barely tested Londoner of Scottish descent who came to Russia to make his fortune in 1779. Over the next few years, Cameron
and a small army of Russian and Scottish labourers created an elegant neoclassical gallery above the Roman baths on which he had written a treatise. ‘To drive you wild, monsieur le chevalier,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm in 1786, ‘I have to tell you that you will no longer be able to find me here after dinner, because apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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:

‘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.’
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So powerful was that habit that it was not only her favourite summer palace that she had ‘turned upside down, so to speak’:

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 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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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:

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.’
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In reality, even Catherine’s budget was overstretched. In 1778, she had her ambassador in Paris commission a 744-piece 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.
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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’.
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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’.
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Most of his subsequent designs were supplied with alternative specifications, allowing for variations in cost.