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The Last Romanovs The owners of the Winter Palace had different attitudes to it: some loved the "ancestral home", like Nicholas I; others sensed above all the formal grandeur of "a monument preserving the traditions of several reigns". Alexander III avoided spending long periods of time in the Winter Palace. Still, its status as an imperial residence remained unchanged and the building was carefully maintained. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, the balustrade sculpture of Pudost stone was replaced by hollow replicas made of copper sheeting. In the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th, important changes took place in the external appearance of the palace and the surrounding area. On the initiative of Empress Maria Fiodorovna, the wife of Alexander III, in 1885 a garden was laid out in the centre of the main courtyard that had been cobbled and devoid of greenery. The garden, surrounded by a granite plinth and containing a fountain, was designed by the court architect Nikolai Gornostayev. Trees were planted in the courtyard and paths laid out. Limestone pavements were placed along the walls of the palace. The main entrance from Palace Square was reworked. In 1886 it was adorned by massive wrought-iron gates designed by Roman Melzer. Ten years later, when Nicholas II was already on the throne, the little square in front of the western facade that had been used for the changing of the guard was replaced by a garden with a fountain. The garden, designed by the architect Nikolai Kramskoi, was intended to reduce the noise from the horse tramway laid between the palace and the Admiralty. The creation of the garden required the construction of a granite porch at the Saltykov Entrance. In 1901 a railing incorporating gilded eagles and monograms designed by Melzer was set up around the garden on a tall base of dark red sandstone. At the Palace Square and Neva ends there were gates surmounted by imperial crowns. The colour of the stone plinth prompted a change in the colour of the Winter Palace facades - both the walls and the architectural details were painted a reddish shade of brown. The building lost the contrast of colour characteristic of Russian Baroque architecture. A number of architects asserted that the new colour scheme strengthened the impression of the noble grandeur of the building, investing it with greater monumentality and underlining its status as an imperial residence. The same colour was used on the facades of the buildings forming the Palace Square ensemble - the General Staff and the Staff of the Corps of Guards. The single shade of paint smoothed over the stylistic differences between the buildings and encouraged the perception of the ensemble as a single whole. In 1911 the facades of the Winter Palace were repainted in a lighter shade, but again without the architectural details being picked out. That is how the palace met the revolutionary year of 1917, when the new Soviet era in its history began. |
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