The Petrine Image by Foreign Painters.
The representation of Peter the Great (and his wife Catherine I) in the arts deserves a section to itself as it is quite a vast topic involving a variety of media: Peter is painted, printed, carved, and sculpted.[1] He also appears in a number of guises, Hercules (for his victories over the Swedish “lion”), and Samson who forced apart the lion’s jaws. He is St George, Neptune, Jupiter, and Pygmalion; he also appears as himself and a miscellany of virtuous heroes on the coinage of the realm. In oil painting, a large number of royal portraits in a multiplicity of styles by artists from both Russian and European nations exist in originals, copies, or problematic attributions. Most of the images of Peter are by foreign artists which is not surprising given the lack of talent in Russia before Peter revolutionized art training there. Peter’s wife the Tsaritsa Catherine Alekseeva, later Empress Catherine I, was painted by J. M. Nattier in 1717, who worked for Peter in Holland; but though Nattier painted the Tsar in the grand baroque manner, Peter preferred Dutch artists, therefore it is predictable that a large number of his portraits were painted by Dutch artists. In Amsterdam in 1717 portraits of Peter and Catherine were painted from life by Arnold Boonen, an artist who the Tsar grew to like and Karl Moor (Carel de Moor). The Boonen portraits have unfortunately disappeared, though a portrait of the Tsar in the Rijksmuseum by Rembrandt’s pupil Aert de Gelder (above) exists which was painted at the same time.[2]A number of portraits of the royal couple exist which have been attributed to Moor, though these may be copies by a Russian artist from the Dutch original. There is Kneller’s full length portrait of 1698 which adopts the formula of his earlier portrait of James II (1684-5). Kneller (1646- 1723) was the most famous portraitist of his day; he came from Lübeck and trained in Leyden and Amsterdam, hence another Dutch link. Peter was obviously pleased with his portrait because afterwards he commissioned miniatures painted on enamel and decorated with gemstones. There are less portraits of the Tsar in sculpture, though Peter admired the art and desired it for the gardens and interiors of the royal palace; but disappointedly there is hardly any worthy of mention save for some of the monuments of the Italian C. B. Rastrelli (1675-1744) a Florentine sculptor who moved to Russia in 1716. There he worked primarily as an architect and participated in the planning of Vasilevskiy Island in St Petersburg. Amongst foreign artists who carved Peter’s image are Rastrelli and Marie-Anne Collot, the daughter-in-law of the more famous sculptor Falconet who carved the famous equestrian statue of the Tsar during Catherine the Great’s reign.
[1] Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 207.
[2] Another theory is that this was painted later in St Petersburg by an unknown artist, then brought to Holland as an official gift, Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 197.
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