On 12 June 2024, the exhibition “Jean-Marc Nattier. Portraits of Peter the Great and Catherine I. Conservation Completed” begins its run in the Moorish Hall of the Winter Palace.
The portraits by the French artist Jean-Marc Nattier occupy a special place in the gallery of painted likenesses of Peter the Great and his wife, Catherine I. Executed in the finest traditions of portraiture at the French royal court, these works are marked by an exceptional ceremonial grandeur in the treatment of the royal couple’s images.
Both spouses posed for the artist in 1717, during a journey around Europe. The couple travelled across Germany to Holland. It was there that Peter met Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), a master of the historical and portrait genres whom the Tsar wanted to invite to enter his service. The artist did accept commissions for portraits and battle paintings from the Russian monarch, but he turned down the idea of travelling to a distant country.
Nattier painted the portrait of the future Catherine I in The Hague, where the Tsarina was waiting for her husband to return from a visit to France. That is indicated by the artist’s signature and the date on the canvas. On Peter’s orders, the picture was sent to him in Paris, and the artist also made his own way there. The Tsar liked the painter’s work, and he commissioned a portrait of himself as a companion piece to it.
The formal depiction of Peter also gained the monarch’s strong approval and became a standard image of him, with numerous copies being made of it. The primary work is considered to be the portrait now in the collection of the Residenz in Munich. That picture bears the artist’s signature and date. The likeness of Peter in the Hermitage is close to the Munich version, but researchers had expressed doubts regarding the authorship of the work. The conservation and studies carried out made it possible to confirm Nattier’s authorship – the painter produced his own replica of the original at the same time and place, Paris in 1717.
In the State Hermitage’s Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Easel Paintings, work on giving the portraits back their authentic appearance began in 2021. Yellowed and badly deteriorated varnishes, areas of later overpainting and restoration retouching were distorting the artist’s original work.
First of all, the portraits were thoroughly examined using infrared reflectography, photographs taken under ultraviolet light and x-rays. This helped to precisely determine the paintings’ state of preservation, the character and location of losses, damage and restorers’ additions. Studies of the chemical composition of the materials used by the painter showed that they match up on both canvases.
The complete set of conservation measures comprised reducing the thickness of the old varnish, removing later overpainting and prophylactic reinforcement of the paint layer and ground on both portraits across the entire surface. Where there were losses, restoration primer was applied, while old areas of textured mastic were corrected. The final stage was making good the losses in the paint layer, which required the specialists to adhere to the technical characteristics of the original artist’s manner of painting.
The work carried out made it possible to give the celebrated French artist’s pictures back a sense of depth in the painting, of the complexity of shapes and textures, of the subtle refinement of colour combinations that had been concealed beneath a layer of darkened varnishes and overpainting of various dates.
The conservation, technical and technological study of the paintings was carried out by the Laboratory for the Scientific Restoration of Easel Paintings (headed by Victor Korobov), part of the Department for Scientific Restoration and Conservation (headed by Tatiana Baranova), and the Department for Scientific and Technical Examination (headed by Alexander Kosolapov).
Conservation: Sergei Nikolayevich Bogdanov
Technical and technological study: Sergei Vladimirovich Khavrin, Maxim Vadimovich Lapshin, Kamilla Burkhanovna Kalinina, Irina Andreyevna Grigoryeva.
A film has been made for the exhibition about the history of the creation, study and conservation of the portraits. Information about the conservation and the results of the various studies is presented at a multimedia stand located within the display.
This section of the exhibition has been created by staff of the Sector for the Production of Electronic Publications (headed by Irina Melnikova): Artemy Viacheslavovich Baranov, Olga Arkadyevna Zharkovskaya, Sergei Veniaminovich Morozov and Nadezhda Leonidovna Shamova.
The exhibition curator is Natalia Yuryevna Bakhareva, senior researcher and keeper of 18th-century paintings in the Department of the History of Russian Culture.
The exhibition can be visited by all holders of entry tickets to the Main Museum Complex until 29 September 2024.
