Let's ask ... the contemporaries of Catherine herself, who left us memoirs and correspondence. Here is what follows from them: the court painter Virgilius Eriksen most reliably portrayed Catherine! A Dane by birth, he worked at the Russian imperial court from 1757 to 1772. Virgilius was born in the city of Copenhagen in 1722 and studied painting with Solomon Wahl. He arrived in Russia as an already established 35-year-old artist who knows how to please high-ranking persons. In the work of the master, who had matured by the middle of the 18th century, the features of baroque, rococo and classicism were gracefully intertwined. Eriksen skillfully, at a high professional level, worked in various painting techniques, including the pastel technique, rare for Russian painters. At that time, almost in the first place, one should be able to gracefully and subtly flatter his high customers, and therefore the portraits of Virgilius were not intended to reveal the human soul, but only to display the appearance, to tell about the status, manners, habits of influential people.

Arriving in St. Petersburg, Eriksen was introduced to the court of Elizabeth Petrovna. The first beauty of Europe was almost forty-eight years old (born December 18, 1709). The Dane pleased the then empress, who was already ill, by creating one of her most attractive portraits.

Did the painter use portraits of the young Elizabeth, or was he able to see the tender features of the Russian Venus in the aging lady? The portrait is very beautiful, refined and elegant, thanks to the lightness and glazing transparency of the stroke. The portrait is in the Catherine's Tsarskoye Selo Palace in the city of Pushkin.

Elizaveta Petrovna died on December 25, 1761. Her nephew Pyotr Fedorovich took the throne. During a long period of mourning, for forty days, the wife of the new emperor, Catherine, almost spent the day and spent the night at the tomb of the deceased and wept over it, dressed in strict mourning. These days, Eriksen creates a portrait of Ekaterina Alekseevna in a mourning dress.

W. Eriksen. Empress Catherine in mourning

A strict and simple image is full of sadness. Hated by her husband, Catherine is in a difficult situation, between life and death, a monastery and a fortress. But she is smart and full of manly dignity. Her posture is calm, her mind glows in her eyes.

After ascending the throne as a result of a palace coup, Catherine appointed Eriksen as court painter. The reputation of the master by that time was very high, and Catherine generally favored foreign artists. Eriksen will paint about thirty portraits of the Empress, in different compositions, costumes and poses. Despite the graceful, subtle flattery, at the same time, he leaves the true features of this great woman as a keepsake for posterity. Catherine, by nature, got a narrow long face. The long nose and chin did not make her beautiful, but her mind and demeanor made her charming. She herself recalled how, as a child, a governess asked her not to hurt anything with her “outstanding” chin. The young bride of the heir to the throne was distinguished by her lively character, she danced deftly, and rode fearlessly. After thirty, the Grand Duchess became stout. In her memoirs, she calls herself tall, of course, for her time. I strongly advise readers to refer to the memoirs of Catherine II, which can be found in libraries. Also, be sure to read the book by Olga Eliseeva "Catherine II", published in the ZHZL series.

In 1762, Eriksen creates an equestrian portrait of Catherine. The Empress is depicted riding a handsome horse Brilliant in the uniform of a Colonel of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. The picture depicts the historical moment of the coup from June 28 to 29, 1762. But memories of that momentous event remained, from which it follows that the Empress was in the uniform of a guards officer, but not of the Preobrazhensky, but of the Semyonovsky regiment. So let's turn to these memoirs, the author of which is a friend of the Empress, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. So, declaring herself a colonel of the guards, and dressed in a guards uniform, the empress set out on horseback at the head of the regiments from the capital to Peterhof in order to consolidate her position and get her husband to abdicate the throne, giving it a decent look. Her friend was galloping next to the empress, also in a guards uniform. Dashkova recalls: “We had to ... go to Peterhof at the head of the troops. The Empress had to put on the uniform of one of the guards regiments; I did the same; Her Majesty took the uniform from Captain Talyzin (Semenovets), and I from Lieutenant Pushkin ( Preobrazhenets), since they were about the same height as us." As you can see, the Empress had to act in a hurry. Eriksen also paints a ceremonial portrait, and all Russian emperors, starting with Peter I, were considered chiefs of the Life Guards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment and had the rank of colonel.

W. Eriksen. Empress Catherine II on horseback Brilliant

Creating the solemn Throne Hall of the Grand Peterhof Palace, the architect Yu.M. Felten received an order to mount an equestrian portrait of the empress in the middle of the main eastern wall, above the throne. Eriksen's work was considered so successful that the highest command came out to fulfill it two more times. One painting is now in the State Hermitage, the second - in the Moscow Armory.

W. Eriksen. Portrait of Catherine II in front of the mirror The original decision of the image of the Empress. I'm awake and in the mirror. The Empress is depicted in a ceremonial robe with huge fizhma and the blue ribbon of St. Andrew the First-Called, with a small crown on her head. In the right hand - a fan, the left with gracefully bent fingers, pressed to the chest. The cheeks are heavily reddened. The toe of a shoe is coquettishly exposed from under the dress. Catherine's friendly gaze is turned to the viewer. Before us is a kind, charming and sensible woman-philosopher. On a table under the mirror, on a scarlet pillow, lies the Great Imperial Crown and next to it is a wand - the attributes of absolute power. In the depths of the mirror, against a black background, is the reflection of the Empress in profile. This is a completely different Catherine - the autocrat. A strict, arrogant profile is the true face of the formidable Catherine the Great.

W. Eriksen. Portrait of Catherine II in shugay and kokoshnik

Most likely, the portrait was painted in 1772,shortly before Eriksen's departure to his homeland. The costume emphasizes the "Russianness" of the born German princess.

It can be assumed that Eriksen's work influenced the young Fyodor Rokotov. With the same ease and transparency, Rokotov later painted "naked arms, chest and shoulders with their inhuman blueness." Leaving for Denmark, the artist took with him many of his works, and Catherine had to buy them from him. She reports this in one of her letters to Baron Grimm. The Empress writes that she ordered all her portraits to be bought from Eriksen, the number of which is not small - only thirty. Then she will send some of these portraits as diplomatic gifts to foreign courts, and will also present them as a gift to her trusted foreign correspondent friends.

In Denmark, Virgilius Eriksen was appointed court painter to Queen Juliana Maria, where he worked until the end of his life. The artist died on May 25, 1782 in Rungstedgard.

During World War II, in one of the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo, a group of Soviet soldiers stumbled upon rooms decorated in a completely crazy erotoman style. One of the walls was completely hung with variously shaped phalluses carved from wood, along the walls were armchairs, bureaus, chairs, screens decorated with pornographic images.

The soldiers - the oldest was only twenty-four years old - were amazed and snapped several films with their "watering cans". Young guys did not loot and did not break furniture, they just took a couple of dozen photos as a keepsake. Most of the cassettes disappeared in the fire of the war, but a few shots did fall into the hands of Peter Vodich, who lives in Belgium and is the author of several extremely interesting investigative films.

He came to Russia and tried to find out what happened to the furniture from those five rooms. Alas, he did not find out anything. Museum workers flatly refused to talk about this topic and stated that Catherine the Second did not have any "sex-secret offices". Then, nevertheless, they took me to Gatchina and showed fifteen scattered exhibits from the Hermitage funds. A snuffbox, several figurines, a shield with erotic medallions. “Of course,” one historian who does not work in the Hermitage coldly said, “Ekaterina, being a person of impeccable taste, would not limit herself to such an eclectic set, but you will never know where the rest of the exhibits are.” The staff of the Hermitage talked about paintings, engravings, petty curiosities, but the fact of the existence of furniture was completely denied.

However, it is known that in the 1930s a collection of erotic art belonging to the Romanov family was cataloged. This collection was shown to selected visitors to the museum, evidence of this has been preserved. But there is no catalog. It, like the entire collection, was allegedly destroyed in 1950. Judging by the stories, a significant part of the exhibits belonged to the 18th century, but who are these storytellers? What did they understand about art?

The Hermitage employees admit that Catherine designed a kind of boudoir for Platon Zubov, but they immediately deny that anything from this office survived to the 20th century.

However, it is not. There is a well-known story about how Andrei Ivanovich Somov, who worked in the Hermitage, showed St. Petersburg intellectuals an officially non-existent rarity - a wax copy of Potemkin's member, and Vasily Rozanov, by the way, damaged it with his sweaty fingers. And so, by chance and almost by chance, but certain people, whose names I would not like to name for certain reasons, stumbled upon a really large-scale collection of erotica and pornography - the “secret office”.


Whether it will be possible to find the "erotic study", or whether it will remain a legend, no one can say with confidence now. We talked with Vodich about all this for several hours in a row, figuring out different possibilities, but we came to the conclusion that only chance can clarify the situation.

This, alas, is the tradition of modern supermuseums - to hide and sometimes even destroy artifacts of erotic art. Yes, in times of rampant pornography and endemic libertianism, culture tragers tremblingly preserve the traditions of bigotry and hypocrisy. And the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Pinakothek in Munich, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, not to mention the Prado in Madrid and the Vatican in Rome, in the near foreseeable future will, like two hundred years ago, keep erotic art for seven Swiss locks, away from the eyes of the immodestly curious public.

Her associates were major statesmen and military figures: A.A. Vyazemsky, N.I. Panin, A.R. Vorontsov, P.A. Rumyantsev, A.G. Orlov, G.A. Potemkin, A.A. Bezborodko, A.V. Suvorov, F.F. Ushakov, and others. She published the magazine "Vssakaya Vsyachina", composed plays, collected paintings and books; wrote her notes and a 4-volume work on the history of Russia - "Notes on Russian History". Her letters and notes by N.I. Panin, correspondence with the English ambassador C. Williams, conversations with D. Diderot, correspondence with Baron Grim, Voltaire, P.A. Rumyantsev, A.G. Orlov. Her political correspondence and papers of the empress have been published.

In politics, Catherine was a pragmatist. She considered serfdom to be economically inefficient and in the first years of her reign spoke out in favor of softening it. But she went to meet the nobles: in 1765, the landowners received the right to exile the peasants to hard labor; during her reign, the landowners received free of charge more than 50 million acres of land and 425 thousand serf "souls".

At the same time, the secularization of church lands made 910,000 souls state-owned. In 1763, new states of state institutions were approved, the employees of which from now on began to receive a salary more or less regularly. The reform of 1775 introduced a new administrative division, which was preserved until the 1930s, and a new system of local authorities: the head of the county government, the police captain, was elected by the nobility, the court was separated from the administration; completely new institutions appeared - the orders of public charity, which were in charge of schools and hospitals.

Her reforms were aimed at raising industry and trade (decree on freedom of enterprise in 1775, issue of banknotes in 1769). The “Letter of Letters to the Cities” of 1785 guaranteed the townspeople the protection of their personal honor and dignity and the right to own property. The “City Society” elected the city duma, which was in charge of only landscaping and sanitary conditions - under the control of the mayor of the nobility. The school reform of 1786 created a system of all-class education in the same type of main and small public schools.

A strong centralized monarchy with a developed system of local authorities, according to the empress, had to be combined with “immutable” laws defining the rights of the estates, and partial self-government (“charts” to the nobility and cities in 1785) - which created the basis for the formation of a civil society. society. A draft of a “letter of commendation” to state peasants was also prepared - on the arrangement of free rural inhabitants, but was not put into effect.

She abolished the word "slave" and obscene abuse in official documents, corporal punishment for priests. A first-class museum appeared in Russia - the Hermitage, educational institutions for "noble maidens" and an Orphanage for orphans and foundlings were opened, a Free Economic Society was formed. A large number of new magazines were published, book publishing, musical and theatrical arts were encouraged.

Under Catherine II, Russia took one of the leading places in the “concert” of European powers: “Not a single gun in Europe, without our permission, dared to shoot,” old chancellor A.A. later told young employees. Bezborodko. The generals and diplomats of the Empress resolved the fundamental task of Russian foreign policy - the mastery of the Black Sea coast (Russian-Turkish wars of 1768-1774 and 1787-1791), defended the borders in the Russian-Swedish war of 1788-1790. With the beginning of the French Revolution of 1789, Catherine II contributed to the education in 1792-1793. coalition of European countries against France. When the Constitution of 1791 was adopted in neighboring Poland, Russian and Prussian troops were brought there and it ceased to exist as an independent state (partitions of Poland). At the same time, a turn took place in domestic policy from reforms to reaction (“cases” by N.I. Novikov, A.N. Radishchev, the establishment of censorship in 1796).

During the reign of Catherine II, the country's population increased from 20 to 36 million people, the budget increased from 16 to 69 million rubles, and domestic trade increased by 5 times. With the accession of the Northern Black Sea region, new cities arose - Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Sevastopol; the Black Sea trade revived. Military power was provided by a 400,000-strong army and a powerful fleet. But behind the resounding victories and the official "prosperity" of the empire, by the end of the century, the first signs of an incipient crisis appeared. Costly wars and reforms led to foreign borrowing, persistent budget deficits, and inflation.

Most often, picturesque representations of royalty (and especially in the 18th century) are formed on the basis of ceremonial portraits, from which copies were actively removed and distributed. Such portraits can be “read”, because the model on them is always placed in such an environment that contributes to creating a feeling of significance, unusualness, solemnity of the image, and each of the details contains a hint of the real or imaginary merits and qualities of the person we see in front of us.

Most of the formal portraits are impossible not to admire. But the question of how true the portrait is, remains open.

So, for example, the image of Catherine I, created by Jean-Marc Nattier in 1717:

But the more intimate portrait of Catherine in a peignoir, written by Louis Caravacom in the 1720s.

It seems that the researchers came to the conclusion that initially the empress was depicted in the portrait with a neckline, and then a blue ribbon appeared, which can be understood as a hint at the ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called and the high status of the person. The only hint.

Louis Caravaque received the appointment of the official court painter - Hoffmaler only under Anna Ioannovna, but before that he managed to paint a number of portraits of the family of Peter the Great. Among them are some unusual by modern standards.

Firstly, I personally immediately remember the portrait Tsarevich Peter Petrovich as Cupid

Here, of course, it should be said that Russia took over from Europe the gallantry of the rococo, along with its special atmosphere of a masquerade, playing heroes and gods of ancient mythology, and manners, which could not but affect the pictorial tradition.

And yet there is something peculiar in the fact that we see little Peter, “Shishechka”, as his loving parents called him, who had high hopes for him, we see just like that. But the birth of this boy, who did not live even four years, as well as his relatively strong health at first, actually sealed the fate of Tsarevich Alexei.

We can also imagine the elder sister of Pyotr Petrovich Elizaveta, remembering the portrait of the work of the same Caravak, written in 1750:

Or a portrait by his student Ivan Vishnyakov, painted in 1743:

But even during the life of the empress, another portrait of Elizabeth Petrovna, painted in the middle of the 1710s by Caravaque, in which she is depicted in the form of the goddess Flora, enjoyed great success:

The future empress is depicted naked and lying on a blue robe lined with ermine - a sign of belonging to the imperial family. In her right hand she holds a miniature with a portrait of Peter I, to the frame of which is attached St. Andrew's blue ribbon.

Yes, a tradition, but there is a certain kind of piquancy in such an image. N. N. Wrangel left an interesting remark about the portrait: “Here is a little girl, an eight-year-old undressed child with the body of an adult girl. She is reclining, coquettishly holding a portrait of her father and smiling so affectionately and tenderly, as if she is already thinking about Saltykov, Shubin, Sievers , Razumovsky, Shuvalov and all the others whom this beautiful creature loved after."

However, he also noted that Elizabeth had many images.

Here is Elizaveta Petrovna in a men's suit that suited her like this:

A.L. Weinberg considered the portrait to be the work of Caravaque and dated it to 1745. S.V. Rimskaya-Korsakova believed that this was Levitsky's student's copy of Antropov's work, going back to the iconographic type of Caravak.

And here is another portrait of Elizabeth in a man's costume - the textbook "Portrait of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna on a horse with a black child", written by Georg Christoph Groot in 1743:

This portrait can be called front. Here is the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, a blue moire sash with a badge, a marshal's baton in the hand of the Empress, a Transfiguration uniform, and also the fact that Elizaveta Petrovna is sitting on a horse like a man, and the navy seen in the bay.

Caravak also has a “Portrait of a boy in a hunting suit”, about which various versions were built. They called it both the Portrait of Peter II, and the portrait of Peter III and ... the portrait of Elizabeth. For some reason, the latest version is very close to me.

There are a lot of ceremonial portraits of Catherine II. They were painted both by foreigners invited to Russia and by Russian artists. We can recall, for example, the portrait of Catherine painted by Vigilius Eriksen in front of a mirror, in which the artist uses a peculiar technique that allows him to show the Empress both in profile and in full face.

The profile image of the empress was used for the ceremonial portrait painted by Rokotov:

Catherine herself apparently loved another portrait painted by Eriksen, depicting her on horseback:

Still would! After all, the portrait symbolizes the fateful day for the Empress on June 28, 1762, when she, at the head of the conspirators, goes to Oranienbaum to carry out a palace coup. Catherine sits astride her famous horse Brilliant and is dressed in a military style - she is wearing the uniform of an officer of the guards infantry.

The portrait was a huge success at court; by order of the Empress, he repeated his work three times, varying the size of the canvas.

Eriksen also painted a portrait of Catherine II in shugay and kokoshnik:

One can recall the informal portrait of Catherine II in a traveling suit, painted by Mikhail Shibanov, an artist about whom almost nothing is known. Is it just that he was close to Potemkin?:

Remembering the non-ceremonial portraits of Catherine the Great, it is impossible to pass by the image created by Borovikovsky.

The artist showed Catherine II “at home”, in a fur coat and a cap. An elderly lady slowly walks along the alleys of Tsarkaselsky park, leaning on a staff. Next to her is her beloved dog, an English greyhound.

The idea of ​​such an image probably originated in the literary and artistic circle of Nikolai Lvov and is closely connected with a new trend in art, called sentimentalism. It is significant that the portrait of Catherine II was not executed from nature. There is evidence that the artist was dressed in the dress of the empress by her beloved camera-jungfer (room servant) Perekusikhina, who posed for the artist.

By the way, the fact that in the 18th century only 8 official court painters worked in Russia, among which only one was Russian, and even then ended his life almost tragically, is quite interesting. Therefore, it is not surprising that Russian artists did not have the opportunity to paint emperors and empresses alive.

For this work, Borovikovsky, about which Lumpy fussed, was awarded the title of "appointed" to academicians. However, despite the recognition of the Academy of Arts, the empress did not like the portrait and was not acquired by the palace department.

But it was in this image that Pushkin captured her in the "tale of honor" "The Captain's Daughter".