Catherine the Great, a great art collector

Loved by some (quite a few), loathed by others (many too), and the subject of gossip to most of her contemporaries, Catherine II of Russia a.k.a. Catherine the Great (1729-1796) remains in History not only one of the most influential female rulers, but also the world biggest art collector of her time.

Empress Catherine the Great curated a vast art collection that formed the foundation of one of the world’s greatest museums, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She used art to educate and enlighten Russian people and, in this way, to expand Russian perspectives right across society. The Empress herself assembled many of these treasures, which are now permanent exhibits in the museum.

Catherine the Great was both the founder of the Hermitage Museum and the woman who politicized the international art market and made Russia the black sheep that snapped up the great collections of art regardless of the price. She was one of the most acquisitive art collectors of any age, someone who dispatched advisers to collect the great objects of her time, among them paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, and Velázquez, treasures from China, and works by the most innovative and daring British painters of the day.

When George Walpole, the grandson of the great English art collector and Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, decided to sell Granddad’s art collection to fund his extravagant lifestyle, he promptly contacted the Russian ambassador to Great Britain, Alexey Musin-Pushkin, who had organised the purchase for Catherine for the staggering sum of £40,000.

The English were furious and felt humiliated: they pilloried Catherine in the thriving caricature press and secretly encouraged wars designed to drain the Russian coffers. The Russian Empress was undeterred and continued to acquire some of the most significant art collections of her day, including those of Count von Brühl, Duke de Choiseul, Baron Crozat de Thiers and that formed by Johann Gotzkowski for Frederick II of Prussia.

In addition to Catherine II, Nicholas I, Alexander I, and other members of the imperial family also collected paintings for the museum, spending huge amounts of money for their hobby.

After Russia became the Soviet Union, the fate of the famous collection became uncertain. In the 1920s, the economy of the Soviet federation was in a deplorable state. Building a bright communist future required financial injections and economic support. The government had already sold off collections of jewelry, furniture and icons seized from the Russian nobility, the wealthy bourgeoisie, and the church. But the impoverished country still needed bread, Western tractors, excavators, and other equipment. And “gazing” at pictures in museums doesn’t make you full! At least that’s what the leader of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin himself thought, hence he came up with a “brilliant” idea: to sell abroad the painting masterpieces of past centuries that were in museums. He wanted the objects of art to be sold legally and “extremely quickly”. Later, Lenin’s very “practical” idea was taken up and boosted by Comrade Stalin.

Therefore, the Hermitage was instructed to sell a few hundred paintings, for at least 5000 rubles each, plus other treasures. The sale was supposed to be secret, but word was quietly spread to selected Western art dealers and collectors that the paintings were on the market.

The first foreign buyer to purchase Hermitage paintings was Calouste Gulbenkian, the founder of the Iraq Petroleum Company, who began buying paintings in early 1930, trading them for oil with the Russians. These works later formed part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. However, the organizers of the sale were dissatisfied with the amounts they received from Gulbenkian, so they looked for other buyers.

Andrew Mellon was an American banker, Secretary of the Treasury under various Presidents, art collector, and, at the time, American Ambassador to Great Britain. He conceived the idea of founding a national art museum for the United States modeled after the National Gallery in London. By the end of 1931, Mellon had acquired, via a consortium constituted with other dealers, twenty-one paintings for a total price of $6,654,000. They included Van Eyck’s Annunciation and Raphael’s The Alba Madonna. The Raphael’s painting was sold for $1,166,400, the largest sum ever paid for a single painting until that time. In 1937, Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings, along with the money to build a national museum of art to house them, to the United States Government. The paintings were, and remain, the heart of the National Gallery of Art collection in Washington D.C.

Between 1929 and 1934, under Stalin’s leadership, hundreds of paintings were sold from the Hermitage Museum. The only person in the Soviet government who understood the blasphemy of what was happening was People’s Commissar A. V. Lunacharsky, but no one heard him. The secret sales of paintings from the Hermitage came to an end in 1934, possibly as a result of a letter to Stalin from the deputy director of the Museum, Joseph Orbeli, protesting the sale of Russia’s treasures. The director of the Hermitage, Boris Legran, who had been brought to the Museum to conduct the sale, was dismissed in 1934 and replaced by Orbeli.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Parliament of the Russian Federation passed a new law prohibiting the sale of Russian art treasures to foreign countries. In 2008, the Russian government has set up a commission to review the legality of the Soviet Union’s sale of artworks from the country’s museums before World War II.

Despite the irrecoverable losses suffered during the first decades of the Soviet Union, Catherine the Great’s art collection remains one of the most amazing collections in the world.

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