German-born Catherine the Great (Catherine II) came to power in 1762, aged thirty-three, and ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, until her death in 1796. She saw herself as a Philosopher Queen, a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, she modernised Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from Antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe. A fluent speaker of Russian, French and German, Catherine was largely self-educated, independent, idealistic and visionary.

While her reign was not always peaceful, Catherine sought to bring order, stability and prosperity to the vast Russian Empire. Her ideals of abolishing serfdom and ensuring the equality of all citizens under the law were ahead of her time, and strongly resisted by the nobility of the day; however, she achieved numerous other reforms, including the introduction of paper money and modernisation of Russia’s education system. French philosopher Denis Diderot, who visited St Petersburg in 1773, described an audience with Catherine as being ‘more like study than anything else: she is a stranger to no subject; there is no man in the Empire who knows her nation as well as she’.

Personal habits

Catherine rose at seven in the morning, drank strong black coffee and wrote until nine. From nine to twelve she would be de-briefed. She lunched at two and responded to mail or read. She entertained at the Hermitage in the evenings from six, and occasionally in her private rooms, but guests left by ten. Catherine ate sparingly but did not stint with offering her guests a lavish array of dishes.

‘Flying tables’

Catherine had a ‘flying’ mechanical dining table that rose up through the ceiling with guests’ noted selection of dishes. It would then be lowered with the chosen dishes, and raised again for the next course. This novelty was to enable guests to converse without fear of being overheard by servants.

The peace that followed the Europe-wide Seven Years War (1753–63) turned Rome into a busy epicentre of archaeological excavations in the late 1760s. Marvels of ancient Roman architecture and sculpture were being unearthed in the recently discovered Pompeii and Herculaneum, to the delight of scholars and collectors alike. The fever for Antiquity struck Catherine – 3000 kilometres away – with great force. Unable to travel to Italy herself, the Empress enlisted artists of all nationalities, from gem engravers to water-colourists, to capture these Classical wonders for herself and, ultimately, for her fellow Russians.

Catherine the Great made her first acquisition of engraved gems in 1763, in the second year of her reign, and her interest in these objects soon developed into what she called ‘an imperial affair’. The Empress purchased as many important collections of engraved gems she could find. By 1790 she had acquired some 10,000 engraved gems, or cameos, dating from the fourth century BC to contemporary pieces, such as the portrait displayed here of her as Minerva the Roman goddess of art and wisdom, engraved by her courtier and daughter-in-law Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna.

Gems that could not be acquired instead came to St Petersburg as paste and glass copies, most notably the collection made in the London workshop of James Tassie. In this manner Catherine acquired another 34,000 casts and pastes, which were meticulously catalogued and stored in specially designed cabinets filled with sliding drawers. In her youth Catherine had studied ancient Greek and Roman history and philosophy, and the gems’ numerous depictions of Classical history and mythology reignited this passion. In 1785 she wrote: ‘God knows how much pleasure there is in handling all this every day; they contain an endless source of all sorts of knowledge’.

The Sèvres Cameo Service relates to Catherine’s great passion for collecting engraved gemstones. Consisting of 797 individual pieces designed to serve dinner, dessert and coffee to sixty people, the Cameo Service was commissioned from the celebrated Sèvres porcelain manufactory outside Paris as a present for Catherine’s court ‘favourite’, Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Empress’s monogram, ‘E II’ (the Russian version of her name being Ekaterina), woven from garlands of flowers and surmounted by a crown, adorned almost every object in the service.

Production of the service was both time consuming and labour-intensive. The exquisite blue element alone – consisting of separate layers of copper enamel that gradually seeped into the porcelain and set the pure colour – required five firings. In addition to the hundreds of porcelain objects decorated with painted and sculpted cameos and related silverware, the service also included grand central table decorations fashioned from biscuit, or unglazed cream-coloured porcelain, by the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot. These decorations illustrated tales from Greek mythology, and were presided over by a grand biscuit statue of Catherine the Great as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts.

When Catherine the Great began collecting European art, opportunities to acquire fine Italian Old Master paintings were already severely limited. Demand from wealthy collectors was high and the marketplace was saturated with misattributed works, some of which made their way to the Hermitage.

Despite this, Catherine achieved great success collecting sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, particularly from Venice, including great paintings by Titian, Paris Bordone and the enigmatic Lorenzo Lotto. These are complemented by fine examples of Roman and Florentine paintings, such as the famous Female nude (Donna nuda), early 16th century, by an artist very close to Leonardo da Vinci. This select group of paintings beautifully illustrate developments in figurative art, portraiture and religious art in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

In the early years of her reign, Catherine the Great acquired en masse several large collections of drawings representing all the main European schools. This set the foundations for the current Hermitage Museum’s outstanding Cabinet of Drawings. In terms of quality, Catherine’s acquisitions of Italian drawings were of the highest standard, with hundreds of masterworks by the finest Italian artists. The majority of the Italian drawings date from the mid sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries and include many rare and precious works.

In the seventeenth century, Flanders comprised the Catholic-dominated Southern Netherlands or ‘Spanish’ Austrian Netherlands, an area larger than modern Belgium. Thanks in large part to the talents of artist Peter Paul Rubens, the Flanders or ‘Flemish’ school in this era became very prestigious. While chiefly a painter, Rubens had far-reaching stylistic influence on many visual art forms, from prints to silverware and architecture. Every leading artist of seventeenth-century Flanders studied in, passed through or was connected with Rubens’s studio.

A diplomat and court insider, Rubens operated on an international stage. His art was correspondingly monumental; characterised by large forms modelled with loose brushstrokes in glowing, brilliant colours. Rubens’s pupil Anthony van Dyck and collaborator Cornelis de Vos led the way in bringing new naturalism to portraiture. While they catered to different markets (van Dyck to the nobility and de Vos to a rich merchant class) their mutual influence is apparent.

The Hermitage holds the finest collection of Dutch art outside the Netherlands. While Peter the Great (1672–1725) had a passion for Dutch art and acquired some notable masterpieces, Catherine the Great established the depth and breadth of this extraordinary collection, beginning in 1764 with her first acquisitions. In that year Catherine purchased 317 paintings that had been assembled for Frederick II of Prussia by the German merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Among this substantial group were more than 100 Dutch paintings by the most notable masters.

In 1769 Catherine purchased the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, which included spectacular landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Isaack Jansz. van Ostade and Aert van der Neer, as well as four Rembrandt portraits, including the wonderful Portrait of a scholar, 1631. For the rest of her life Catherine continued to add outstanding Dutch works to her rich collection.

Although the paintings and drawings from the Dutch school included here are only a fragment of the extensive and diverse collection of Dutch works assembled by Catherine the Great, they reveal her artistic preferences and taste.

Catherine relied on agents and advisers in France to identify and acquire works of art on her behalf. In this way she secured the collection of Paris banker Louis-Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers, and other important bodies of work in France. Her holdings of French art came to encompass works by Renaissance masters as well as seventeenth-century landscapes and history paintings by Sébastien Bourdon, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.

Catherine also acquired examples of work of her own century, by Rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau. The playful, erotic and at times wistful art of Watteau’s generation gave rise to the intimate and worldly art of François Boucher, whose pictures Catherine also purchased. The Empress also collected modern masterpieces created in reaction to French courtly and decadent styles. Her paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin are premier examples of a new, moralising simplicity in art of the time.

Grimm on Catherine’s intention to buy a famous French art collection: ‘Art lovers yell, artists yell, the rich all yell … The Empress plans to acquire the Crozat collection.’

For Catherine, collecting art was part of a wider economic and diplomatic program aimed at improving Russia’s profile abroad and at encouraging innovative thinking, economic activity and industry at home. At a meeting with the Senate in Moscow in December 1762, Catherine first suggested that consuls be stationed in Spain, Holland and England not only to promote maritime trade but also to source luxury goods and art objects as examples for Russian artists and manufacturers.

In 1779 Catherine the Great acquired 198 paintings from a celebrated collection formed by Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, Britain’s first prime minister. They were bought from the family estate, Houghton Hall, and sold by Walpole’s grandson, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford, who approached the Russian ambassador to Britain directly about the sale. At more than £40,000, the price was high, and the transaction was concluded in only two months. Attempts were made to keep this famous collection in Britain, to no avail.

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment fascination with the East, particularly China, is reflected by Catherine the Great’s architectural and landscaping works completed in St Petersburg and at her summer and winter palaces, as well as by her collecting of Oriental curiosities and philosophical texts. Russian interest in China can be traced to the reign of the Romanov tsars in the seventeenth century, when several missions brought back Chinese treasures and goods to the Russian Court. Importantly, in 1689 the first treaty between Russia and China was signed at Nerchinsk, outlining the border between the countries and rules about caravan trade.

Like many educated people of her time, Catherine was fascinated by the concept of the enlightened ruler thought to be found in China, such as the Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736–95). One of her regular and most influential correspondents was French philosopher Voltaire, who praised the Celestial Kingdom, its monarchs and men of wisdom; only in China, he thought, was a man’s life, honour and property truly protected by law. Such a clear link between Catherine’s desire for justice and order in Russia and general perceptions of good Chinese government, combined with the Enlightenment fashion for curiosities of all kinds, led to great Russian interest in China in the 1770s.

Catherine on her Oriental rooms in the Winter Palace: ‘This museum forms a haven which one reaches via China, China via Turkey, Turkey via Persia’.