Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia

Apollo, March, 2005 by Charlotte Gere

Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia Oleg Neverov Thames & Hudson, 36 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0 500 51182 9 Vendome Press, $65 ISBN 0 865 65225 2

Russia's pre-Revolutionary collectors are the subject of a pioneering survey, reviewed by Charlotte Gere.

Perhaps it is coincidence, but this sumptuously produced volume comes at a time when wealthy Russians are again collecting--principally Russian--works of art. Several records for Russian artists were exceeded at auctions in November. They are following the second and third wave of collectors featured in Neverov's survey, rising professional men and mercantile princes of the later nineteenth century.

Neverov examines the collecting histories of thirty families and individuals of imperial Russia, some famous, some lesser known, from the accession of Peter the Great to the fall of the Romanovs. He also, inevitably, surveys Russian palatial architecture, as successive collectors built suitable edifices to house their treasures. The 'Moscow Renaissance' in the second half of the nineteenth century could be called the age of Fedor Shekhtel, architect of the city's finest merchant palaces. Incidentally, this book is a real treat for anyone who has pored over the 1914 Baedeker's guide to Russia and longed for the cryptic references to these collectors to be decoded.

The book opens with cosmopolitan collecting activities of noble families in the orbit of the Russian court. A useful account of the Romanov collectors and their artistic initiatives parallels the essays on the private collections. Peter the Great had been persuaded of the cultural and educational value of museums and collecting and his entourage was encouraged to seek out western art as well as Russian curiosities and antiquities, a few of which survive in the Hermitage.

The Stroganov family collection, formed over generations, was of imperial magnificence, housed in a beautiful palace by the architect Rastrelli (favourite of Elizabeth I and Catherine II) on the Moika canal in St Petersburg. In 2000 the collection toured the United States to publicise the restoration of the Rastrelli palace, accompanied by a substantial catalogue edited by Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, Stroganoff, the Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family, but it remains rare for these often little-known Russian collections to be so fully published.

Stroganov, Galitzine, Vorontsov, Orlov, Potemkin, Yussupov: these names are not unknown, although the extent of their collecting activities can still amaze. Their tastes are bound up with those of the Romanov court, in the case of Orlov and Prince Grigory Potemkin, being formed by gifts from their lover Catherine.

The collections were housed in palaces that were as much works of art as their contents. Ostankino, the Sheremetev palace outside Moscow, survives with its late eighteenth-century decor, furniture and collections virtually intact. The Yussupov palace, Arkhangelskoye, 20 km outside Moscow, also survives with some of its contents. Neverov reproduces The meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, one of a pair of vast canvases by Tiepolo which are still in situ in the palace, a reminder of its former splendours. But even when antiquities, paintings, sculptures, porcelain and jewelled objets d'art are removed to galleries and museums, the surviving and often lovingly restored palaces allow a glimpse of that vanished world. Many are illustrated here, in old photographs and in the intricately detailed watercolour interior views at which Russian nineteenth-century artists excelled.

The great collectors of the Romanov dynasty cast such a long shadow that it is hard to recall the important part played by private individuals in enriching the holdings of the Hermitage. Catherine the Great so envied the scholarly collection and library of her young favourite Alexander Lanskoi that she bought them (including her own gifts to him) for the Hermitage. Other private collections were bought for the Hermitage, such as antiquities from the Galitzine and Shuvalov family collections. The Tatishchev collection of early Italian and Netherlandish paintings and renaissance objets d'art was bequeathed to Nicholas I. The collections made by two generations of the Khitrovo family of, respectively, engraved gems (emulating the vast collection gathered by Catherine II) and English portraits, eventually found their way into the Hermitage. More than 800 Dutch and Flemish masters gathered by Piotr Semionov-Tian-Shansky, which had been on public exhibition in his gallery on the banks of the Neva, were bequeathed to the museum in 1914.

Boucher's great masterpiece Hercules and Omphale, now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, belonged to the Galitzine family, a diplomatic dynasty stretching from the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. The Pushkin, founded as recently as 1898, mainly as a repository for cast copies of European masterpieces of sculpture, now houses European art and antiquities ceded from the Hermitage as well as Impressionist and modern paintings appropriated from Moscow private collections at the time of the Revolution. The adventurous patronage of contemporary French painting and sculpture by the wealthy Moscow bourgeoisie, notably the Schukin brothers and the Morozovs, ensured that the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Picasso and Matisse are dazzlingly represented. Russian works, for which Moscow collectors had a particular predilection, went to the Tretyakov Gallery, originally a private collection, which was always intended as a public museum. Given the frenzy of selling by the State which followed the Revolution, it is little short of miraculous that the great masterpieces reproduced here still adorn these galleries.