Catherine the Great and Stanisław August: Two Enlightened Monarchs

On 7 December, Russian Orthodox St Catherine’s Day, the exhibition Catherine the Great and Stanisław August: Two Enlightened Monarchs opened in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace, featuring more than 150 works of fine and applied art from the collections of the State Hermitage, the Royal Łazienki Museum, the State Russian Museum, the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts and the State Museum of the History of Religion.

The exhibition aims to inform visitors about the collecting activities of the two monarchs and to compare their collections.

It is possible to find much in common between Catherine II and Stanisław August: both were brought up on the works of French writers and philosophers, had a love of literature, fine art and architecture and sought to bring enlightenment to their subjects. Stanisław August patronized scholars, artists and performing artists, including those he invited from Italy (Marcello Bacciarelli, Bernardo Bellotto, Tommaso Righi) and France (Jean-Pierre Norblin, André-Jean Lebrun). The King’s representatives and agents commissioned and purchased works of art in Italy, France and Holland, quite often competing in this with the envoys of Catherine II, who at that same time were acquiring paintings for the Hermitage. For that reason, the similarity between the collections should come as no surprise.

Although Stanisław August lacked the financial means of Catherine II, he did manage to put together a large collection of works of art. By 1795 the manuscript catalogue of his picture gallery contained almost 2,500 works of various European schools, only slightly fewer in number than the paintings in the Hermitage. Stanisław August was unable to buy whole collections, such as those that had belonged to Crozat or Walpole, but he sought to make up for that by having a good selection of works.

The Italian school was represented by 275 paintings. While those attributed to Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio and Giorgione were most likely copies or the works of pupils, the names of 17th-century masters mentioned in the catalogue look entirely convincing (Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Sassoferrato, Andrea Sacchi, Carlo Maratta, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and others).

Among the 225 Dutch paintings there are mentions of works by Hendrick Goltzius, Gerard van Honthorst, Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu. Modern scholars acknowledge Rembrandt’s authorship of three painting that were once in the royal collection, including the celebrated “Polish Rider” (now in the Frick Collection, New York).

132 paintings were allotted to the Flemish school. Here the list included pictures by Jan Breughel, Van Dyck, Jordaens and David Teniers. Twenty-two works were associated one way or another with the name of Rubens, although only four of them were attributed to the master himself.

Among the 113 works by German artists, particular mention should be made of 25 paintings by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, who is also strongly represented in the Hermitage collection.
Among the collection of French paintings, 18th-century artists predominated, including the King’s contemporaries – Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard. Like Catherine II, the Polish King had a high opinion of the art of his own time. The 1795 catalogue included works by Pompeo Batoni, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Angelica Kauffman and Dietrich, who has already been mentioned. Artists in France who worked on special commissions for Stanisław August included Louis Lagrenée, Joseph-Marie Vien, Claude Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert, all of whom were popular with art connoisseurs in St Petersburg as well.

Despite the losses natural over a 250-year history, Catherine II’s picture gallery has in the main survived to this day. Stanisław August’s collection had a less happy fate, although at present it is possible to identify some 400 paintings from it. The King’s collection was broken up even before his death. He sold or presented over 40 paintings to Russians in St Petersburg. In October 1798, pictures from his collection were sold at a posthumous auction in the Russian capital. In time, some of those works came into the Hermitage by various routes. Stanisław August’s chief heir was his nephew, Józef Poniatowski. Then the collection passed to Józef’s sister, Maria Teresa Tyszkiewicz, who sold the residence in the Łazienki Park to Tsar Alexander I together with paintings, sculpture and applied art. Additionally, 36 paintings from her collection were acquired by Kazimierz Rzewuski. As recently as 1994, his heirs presented 12 paintings to the royal castle in Warsaw (including two Rembrandts). Finally, the remnants of Stanisław August’s picture gallery were bought up in 1821 by someone named Antonio Fuzi.

In 1895, Andrei Somov, the Hermitage’s senior curator of paintings, engravings and drawings, who compiled a catalogue of the paintings in the Łazienki Palace, rated the collection highly and commented that at least 22 paintings could take their place “in any of the museums of first rank in Europe”. The result was a decision to transfer to the Hermitage five “particularly remarkable works”, including Fragonard’s Stolen Kiss. At the same time paintings from the Hermitage were sent to the Łazienki Palace. In 1915 the pictures from the Łazienki collection were removed to Russia due to the military situation and the capture of Warsaw by German troops. Under the 1922 Treaty of Riga, they were either returned to Warsaw or else the Polish side was offered a substitute of equal value.
As a result, the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow now possess over 20 paintings that were once in Stanisław August’s collection. Seven paintings kindly provided by the Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw enhance the impression of the royal collection. For comparison works from the Hermitage are also on display. These were selected with the aim of showing the similar tastes in art of Catherine II and Stanisław August.

A few words should also be said about the sculpture collections of the Empress and the King. Catherine’s collection included works by Jean-Antoine Houdon and Marie-Anne Collot. In the last years of her life, the Empress developed an interest in ancient sculpture, as evidenced by her purchase of the large collection that John Lyde Browne has assembled in Wimbledon. Catherine II also strove to place commissions with Russian sculptors, Academy graduates such as Fedot Shubin and Mikhail Kozlovsky.

Stanisław August assembled in the Łazienki Palace a large collection of casts from famous sculptures of Antiquity and the Modern Era. These included, for example, a plaster statue of Voltaire seated (similar to the marble one in the Hermitage). Today this collection has been restored and is again open for viewing. Individual works in marble were commissioned from Houdon, including a bust of Alexander the Great now kept in the royal castle. The King also invited sculptors from Italy, notably Tommaso Righi and Giacomo Monaldi. It was in Rome, too, that André Lebrun was taken into his service as “first sculptor”. A number of craftsmen worked on commissions from Stanisław August in Italy: Carlo Albacini, Giuseppe Angelini and Antonio d’Este.

Stanisław August brought and presented to Paul I two monumental sculptural groups by Pietro Ceccardo Staggi on subjects from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These are still in the Hermitage, although not included in the exhibition due to their great weight: Prometheus and the First Man is in the Jordan Gallery and Pygmalion and Galatea in the Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting.

For the exhibition the State Hermitage Publishing House has produced an illustrated scholarly catalogue. The exhibition curator is Sergei Olegovich Androsov, Doctor of Art Studies, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art.

The general sponsor of the exhibition is the VTB Bank.