The State Hermitage Publishing House has brought out the book Mebel’nye raritety sem’i Demidovykh. Istoriia i restavratsiia [Furniture Rarities of the Demidov Family. History and Restoration] (Saint Petersburg, 2024). The author is Natalia Yuryevna Guseva, Candidate of Art Studies, Deputy Head of the Department of the History of Russian Culture.
The publication is devoted to the completion of the restoration of a Rococo-style marquetry chest-of-drawers bearing the monogram of Empress Catherine the Great that was made in Saint Petersburg in the 1760s–70s to a commission from Nikita Akinfiyevich Demidov. The rare piece of furniture came into the museum with appreciable losses that distorted its original appearance. In Paris in 2021, Mikhail Alexeyevich Suslov, Vice-President of the International Confederation of Russian Collectors, Antiquarians and Art Dealers, acquired a chest-of-drawers from Pratolino, the Demidovs’ former Italian estate, that once formed a matching pair with the one in the Hermitage. Thanks to this, it proved possible to carry out a complete restoration of the museum exhibit. Comparison of the two pieces of furniture enabled specialists of the Hermitage’s Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Chandeliers to recreate the original appearance of this rare item from the reign of Catherine the Great.
Simultaneously, research was being carried out into the background to the creation of these exceptional pieces of furniture and their subsequent history. In March 2024, an exhibition opened in the Moorish Hall of the Winter Palace that reunited the unique pair of chests-of-drawers after almost a century and a half apart.
The book is aimed at a very broad readership and can be purchased from the museum’s book kiosks.
