Catherine the Great had been on the throne for only a year when she learned of a group of 225 paintings available in Berlin. The collection, reserved for Frederick II, included three Rembrandts, a Frans Hals, and a Rubens. But the Seven Years’ War had bankrupted Frederick, and his art dealer was left deep in debt with works his client could not purchase. With something close to glee, Catherine stepped in to buy the paintings out from under her erstwhile ally, and the collection that had been intended for Sans Souci went to the new Hermitage Museum. In the next few years, Catherine engaged in a buying spree, adding hundreds more artworks from French and British collections, many brokered through her advisor Denis Diderot. Catherine’s immense wealth brought ship after ship to the quay outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, unloading packing crates full of masterpieces to the empress’s delight. “It is not love of art,” she admitted; “It is voracity. I am a glutton.”
Catherine’s art patronage is the subject of Rosalind P. Blakesley’s Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great, a fascinating though occasionally exasperating book. Blakesley, a Cambridge professor of art history specializing in Russian and European art, focuses on a handful of female artists with court-related commissions as well as the eighteenth-century art world of Russia and western Europe. The list of artists under discussion—Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Marie-Anne Collot, Elisabetta Sirani, Rosalba Carriera, Caroline Watson, Angelica Kauffman, Maria Feodorovna, and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun—is necessarily short because, as we are reminded, female artists at that time were distrusted, ignored, and excluded.
And yet. One of the artists who became an imperial favorite was the Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman, a child prodigy, celebrity, and one of only two female founding members of London’s Royal Academy. Her history paintings and portraits, numbering in the hundreds, were so popular that they kept designers and printmakers busy all over Europe—one engraver declared “the whole world is angelicamad.” When Kauffman died, the sculptor Antonio Canova directed a magnificent funeral to honor her.
One engraver declared “the whole world is angelicamad.”
Although Kauffman never traveled to Russia, her work was a favorite with the empress, who delighted in the artist’s sensibility, one that tempered the bracing clarity of neoclassicism with what some critics have termed excessive feminization and sentimentality. Kauffman favored classical scenes and literary subjects with mournful leave-takings and lachrymose lovers, populated with sweet-faced men and women who seem practically boneless. One early work to enter Catherine’s collection was Kauffman’s A Girl at Her Embroidery (A Turkish Girl) (1773), a striking image in which the artist’s mastery of fabric and figure stand out. Dressed in an orientalizing white tunic and embroidered pants, the girl is seated and twists at the waist over her sewing hoop. Unusual in its restraint and emotional quietude, it is Kauffman at her most refined. Here, Blakesley offers one of the many feminist assertions that pepper her text, speculating that Catherine may well have “related to this focus on the agency of a creative woman in a space of intimacy that she could craft and control.”
Indeed, it is this insistent feminism that subverts so much of what is engaging about the book. The fact that Kauffman and other female artists were forbidden from attending life-drawing classes where they might see nude male models was no doubt an impediment in both creativity and career-making. But any female artist might view men at any time: dealers selling one’s work, agents securing commissions, fellow artists, husbands, lovers, fraudulent Swedish counts (such as the one who duped Kauffman into a bigamous marriage)—male bodies by the score on the street and in the drawing rooms. Arguably more helpful was the emerging practice of public art exhibitions that offered new opportunities for female artists. Blakesley allows that Kauffman enjoyed an unusually high degree of renown and commercial success but contends that her primary impact at Catherine’s court was made via her art’s “hallmark disruption of conventional gender roles.”
Equally remarkable was Marie-Anne Collot, the eighteen-year-old apprentice who accompanied the French sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet to Russia to complete a commission for an equestrian monument honoring Peter the Great. Collot’s background was not privileged; at age fifteen she worked as an artist’s model, although she soon proved herself an able sculptor with a specialty in bust portraits. In Petersburg, Catherine’s visits to Falconet’s studio offered Collot an opportunity to sculpt the empress, creating a likeness notable for its modesty and motherliness, the latter a quality that Catherine particularly cherished. For the colossal Peter the Great bronze—now known as The Bronze Horseman and considered one of the most important works of art in Russian history—Falconet acknowledged that it was his pupil (and future daughter-in-law) who had created the head of the tsar in the guise of a Roman emperor, a generous admission from the elder artist. Blakesley concludes that Collot’s work “set the stage for other women artists working in St. Petersburg to produce equally forceful and idiosyncratic work.”
Maria was first and foremost, however, a wife and mother and, briefly, an empress.
By the 1790s, Catherine’s decades of palace-building and art patronage had made Russia an important destination for architects, artists, and craftsmen. It was during this period of change that a rather unexpected artist emerged: Catherine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna. The grand duchess was not a professional artist in the sense of Kauffman, Vigée Le Brun, or Collot, but neither was she a dilettante. She learned skills such as lathe-turning, drawing for decorative objects, cameo carving, and miniature painting. When she presented Catherine’s son Paul with an heir, the future Alexander I, the empress gave the couple the property that became the Pavlovsk Palace. Many of the grand duchess’s designs were incorporated in the palace decorations. During her life, the place of women in the arts was changing, albeit more slowly in Russia than elsewhere. Maria was first and foremost, however, a wife and mother and, briefly, an empress. Blakesley enumerates Maria’s artistic endeavors amid her other obligations, but she ends on a sour note, saying that the grand duchess had access to materials and patrons that were not readily available to other women.
The great strength of this book is not in the female artists we meet—the rough-and-tumble Collot, the bold Kauffman, the redoubtable Vigée Le Brun, the striving Therbusch, the exquisite Carriera, and the elegant Feodorovna—but in the picture that emerges of their patron. The empress is shown as a lively if temperamental woman who, understandably, placed the demands of statecraft ahead of art patronage. When grand gestures were to be made—orchestrating the coup against her own husband that placed her on the throne in 1762, commissioning baroque palaces from Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, partitioning Poland yet again—Catherine had an unerring instinct for theatrics and legacy-building. She was also reliably enthusiastic when it came to the purchase of masterpieces from impecunious aristocrats to fill the walls of the Hermitage and her many palaces. Again and again, however, Blakesley seems to be saying that this is not enough.
In the book’s epilogue, the author asks, “Was Catherine as little bothered about the gender of artists as this book suggests?” Who can know? Her own story—from minor German princess to Russian empress—left Catherine in no doubt about a woman’s potential for power and influence. Her connoisseurship was consistent with her views on men and territory: more is more.
