Russkii stil': the Russian style for export

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Anne Odom

The Empire style united the decorative arts of Europe during the first third of the nineteenth century. However, as international expositions became the framework for touting national achievements starting in 1851, each country searched its history for its own distinctive and defining style. The Russians found the rujjku jtil' (Russian style) particularly suited for disseminating their country's rich national heritage abroad. (1)

The Russians carefully reconstructed this artistic tradition through exploration and study just as the English researched and expressed their Gothic tradition in the works of, for example, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) and Owen Jones (1809-1874). Few visitors to the Russian pavilions at world's fairs, however, appreciated the serious nature the Russian revival held for Russians. The dramatic changes brought about by the efforts of Peter I (the Great; r. 1682-1725) to Westernize his country had altered the life of the Russian elite forever. Thus, the Russian found himself in the awkward position of being both European and Eastern at the same time; but no matter how hard he tried to be European, Western travelers generally viewed him as backward and in need of civilizing. As the French writer Astolphe (1790-1857), marquis de Custine, who traveled in Russia in 1839, explained, "I do not reproach the Russians for being what they are, what I blame in them is, their pretending to be what we are. They a re still uncultivated." (2) In the hierarchy of nations exhibiting at the world's fairs during the second half of the nineteenth century "northern Europeans were held in the highest regard, followed by southern Europeans, with Russians, Asians, Africans, and American Indians bringing up the rear." (3) At the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition) in London in 1851 Russians were characterized as wild and woolly cossacks. (4)

Thus, in reviving the Russian style and marketing it abroad, Russians were seeking to reestablish their national identity, which had been lost or compromised in the process of Westernization. The Russian style did not originate as a great national movement, however. It was a court style commissioned by Nicholas I and had important political implications. Following the dislocations of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, many among the Russian elite became suspicious of the virtues of Western culture. Some intellectuals, such as the historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826), perceived early in the century that arts could play a role in the revival of the older ways. He wrote:

It is necessary to show them that their their past is capable of furnishing subjects of inspiration for the artist, of encouraging works of art, of making hearts palpitate. Not only the bistorian, bat also the poet, the sculptor, and the painter can be organs of patriotism. (5)

Inspired by studies of ancient Greek and Roman art, Russians began to explore their own past. By the 1830s archeologists and restorers were at work in various locations in southern Russia. Aleksei Nikolaevich Olenin (1763-1843), who became director of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1817, added the study of Russian antiquities to the school's curriculum in 1830, and in the same year he sent his protege, Fedor Grigor'evich Solntsev, to Moscow to make drawings of Russian artifacts in the collections there, an expedition supported by Nicholas 1.6 Some five hundred of these drawings were included in six volumes entitled Drevnosti rossiskago gosudarstva (Antiquities of the Russian State), published by the Archeological Commission in Moscow between 1849 and 1853 (see Pls. I and VI). Later in the century Vladimir Vasil'evich Stasov (1824-1906), a great proponent of the Russian style, wrote that "our contemporary Russian style is based on the drawings of Solntsev." (7)

Olenin was especially interested in the drawings as models for artists, and they were soon to bear decorative fruit. In 1836 the czar commissioned Solntsev to design a porcelain service ultimately designated for the Great Kremlin Palace (built 1838-1849) in Moscow. This well-documented service for five hundred was made at the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg, and it became the quintessential Russian service, used at coronations and at other major celebrations until 1917. (8) As the model for the dessert plates (see Pl. II) Solntsev copied a gold and enameled plate made in the Kremlin Armory workshops in 1667 for Aleksei I (r. 1645-1676). It and a Turkish washbasin, whose ornament also served as a model for designs on parts of the Kremlin Service, were among the objects included in Drevnosti rossiiskago gosudarstva (see Pl. I).

The decoration on the "white service," a part of the Kremlin Service, included four double-headed eagles, linked by various interlaced ornaments (see Pl. VII). The motifs can be viewed as highly stylized versions of the Cap of Monomakh, the ancient crown of Russia and the imperial crown; the latter derived from Persian and Arabian, or what we would call today Islamic, motifs. These devices were ubiquitous in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Russian ornament and were also found in Byzantine design. (9)