Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

Once Paul’s survival seemed assured, the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar—the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November—marked a natural opportunity for a formal service of thanksgiving in the Winter Palace chapel. ‘On the inside of a rail which extended across the room,’ William Richardson recorded, ‘and close by the pillar which was next to the altar, on the south side, stood the Empress and her son; and also on the inside of the rail, and on each side of the altar, was a choir of musicians. All the rest who witnessed, or took part in the solemnity, excepting the priests, stood on the outside of the rail.’ 32This service, commemorated annually at Court until 1795 and perpetuated by the Senate in February 1769 in churches across the empire, was the first of a barrage of measures designed to propagate the image of a selfless and knowledgeable empress conferring benefits on her people. Bells rang out day and night from every church in the capital for the next two days, with fireworks across the city at midnight. 33No one was more relieved than Dimsdale. ‘I shall never forget the care you gave me,’ Catherine later wrote to him, ‘and the anxiety you experienced in the time following my inoculation and that of my son.’ 34On her name day, 24 November, she invested her doctor as a baron of the Russian empire and rewarded him with £10,000—an outlandish sum, supplemented by an annual pension of £500 for life. 35Alexander Markov, the boy who had supplied the necessary infected matter, was ennobled under the unflattering soubriquet ‘ ospenny ’ (‘Lord Smallpox’). The Court theatre staged an allegorical ballet, Prejudice Overcome , in which the Genius of Science (played by the ballet master Angiolini), Minerva (representing Catherine), and Ruthenia (Russia), conquered Superstition and Ignorance with the assistance of Alcind (Paul) and released the common people from their grasp. 36The commemorative medal, struck in 1772, when inoculations were still being administered in a variety of Russian hospitals, drove home the empress’s fundamental message: ‘She herself set an example.’ 37

When the children of the Austrian empress were successfully inoculated by another British doctor, Maria Theresa held a feast at Schönbrunn at which the royal family waited on his sixty-five lesser-ranking patients. 38Obsessed with order and hierarchy, Catherine would never have turned the world upside down. Competitive as ever, she gaily told Voltaire in December 1768 that ‘more people have been inoculated here in one month than in eight at Vienna’. For her part, she teased, the best medicine during her convalescence had been to listen to readings from Candide, in which the master had written that if two armies of 30,000 men were to meet in battle, two-thirds of the soldiers would be pock-marked: ‘After that, it is impossible to feel the slightest bit ill.’ 39

To make Catherine feel even better, an extension to her palace was nearing completion. At last she would be able to escape echoing staterooms, indulge her passion for informal entertainment, and exercise her legendary charm to devastating effect. Designed by Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Small Hermitage was built on a narrow plot of land immediately to the east of the Winter Palace, hitherto occupied by dilapidated mansions built for two of Peter the Great’s admirals, Cornelius Cruys and Fëdor Golovin. Catherine inspected some early plans while in Moscow after her coronation, work started in 1764, and by the time she returned to the old capital in February 1767, she had seen a magnificent pavilion grow up at the southern end of the site. Grigory Orlov was to live there until 1775 in a suite of rooms linked to her own apartments by a flying bridge. His three reception rooms and a dining room overlooked Millionnaya to the south; to the north, a bedroom, mirrored boudoir and study faced onto a hanging garden. While the empress was preparing to sail the Volga, Cruys’s house on the Neva was finally demolished, and work began to extend the garden northwards to a new pavilion overlooking the river, originally known as the orangery after the fruit trees planted in decorative pots on the balustrade. Catherine inspected a wooden model in March 1768 and by the following February the new building was ready to hold the first of many private entertainments—themselves soon christened ‘small hermitages’—beginning with a theatrical performance in the neighbouring stables and ending with dinner at the two mechanical tables in the easternmost room. 40

Soon imitated by leading aristocrats, this device had been pioneered by Elizabeth at Tsarskoye Selo, where it remained a source of merriment in Catherine’s time:

When the plates are changed you pull a string by the side of everybody’s right hand which goes underneath the table and rings a bell. Your plate goes down, as all round it is composed of so many divisions like stove holes. You write down upon a slate and pencil which is fixed ready, and what you want immediately comes up. A great diversion was from one table to the other to send something or other that served to laugh. 41

Towards the end of the carnival, Dr Dimsdale had to be called when Catherine caught a fever that knocked her off her feet ‘for six whole days, which was highly inconvenient for someone who loves to bustle about and who hates being stuck in bed’. 42But this proved to be merely a temporary interruption to her convivial way of life. ‘Those who form her society,’ Lord Cathcart reported, ‘are either young people who are extremely gay, or such as are capable from the vivacity of their disposition to keep pace with those who are younger than themselves.’ 43

While the northern part of the Small Hermitage was under construction, Catherine decided in March 1768 to build a new gallery along the sides of the hanging garden to house her growing art collection. Some of the finest works to be seen in today’s Hermitage Museum were acquired in these early years. The foundations of the collection had been laid in 1764 with the purchase of 225 paintings belonging to the Berlin picture dealer, Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, whose seventeenth-century Flemish Masters included Jan Steen’s Revellers and Frans Hals’s Young Man Holding a Glove . In the following year, Prince Dimitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn became Catherine’s principal agent in Paris having been appointed ambassador to Versailles at the age of thirty-one. It was thanks to his collaboration with Diderot that the Hermitage acquired Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and a more recent masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paralytic, or the Fruits of a Good Education (1763). When he moved to The Hague in 1768, Golitsyn negotiated the purchase of about 600 paintings—including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Wouvermans and Watteau—from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, who had amassed his treasures by stealing from his master, Augustus III of Poland. But Golitsyn had not lost touch with Diderot, who helped him to secure François Tronchin’s Genevan collection in 1770 and brokered an even more sensational deal in the following year, when Catherine paid the heirs of the Parisian financier Pierre Crozat 460,000 livres for 500 paintings including Giorgione’s Judith , Titian’s Danaë and Raphael’s Holy Family . Diderot believed that the collection was worth more than twice as much. 44

It is hard to say what pleasure Catherine took from most of these purchases. Although her charmed circle included the connoisseurs Alexander Stroganov and Ivan Shuvalov, who spent much of the period between 1763 and 1777 in Italy collecting sculptures for himself and the Hermitage, she seems to have revelled in a kind of inverted snobbery that oscillated between dependence on ‘expert’ opinion and a determination to defy it. She and Lev Naryshkin were ‘professional ignoramuses’, the empress later declared, ‘and we use our ignorance to annoy the Grand Chamberlain Shuvalov and Count Stroganov, who are both members of at least 24 academies’. 45She clearly took a liking to Jean Huber’s innovative cycle of portraits of Voltaire in various intimate, everyday poses, which arrived in St Petersburg at the rate of about one a year after Grimm had announced her commission in the Correspondance littéraire in March 1769. ‘I had to burst out laughing when I saw the patriarch getting out of bed,’ Catherine admitted on re-discovering the paintings hidden away at Tsarksoye Selo in 1776. ‘I think that one’s original: the vivacity of his character and the impatience of his imagination give him no time to do one thing at once. The kicking horse being corrected by Voltaire is also very good.’ 46However, since her early letters reveal little about her personal tastes, it is tempting to conclude that many of the masterpieces arriving in St Petersburg by the carton-load left her unmoved. The sheer scale of her acquisitions prevented any intimate acquaintance with all of them: she bought some 4000 canvases in the first twenty years of her reign.