“Created by a Hand with but a Chisel Armed…” Sculpture in St Petersburg’s Palaces in the 19th Century

The exhibition presents splendid works of sculpture that adorned the halls of imperial and grand-ducal palaces and the private apartments of Petersburgers in the 1800s. A key part of the display is the watercolour interior views of palaces featuring these sculptures that were created by 19th-century artists. In all, more than 70 works from the State Hermitage’s collection are included (over 30 sculptures and 40 watercolours). 

From the early 1800s, works of sculpture were increasingly used to embellish the private apartments of imperial and grand-ducal palaces and also private residences. Portrait busts and statues, groups with mythological and allegorical subjects produced in a great variety of materials and small-scale plastic art in bronze adorned drawing rooms and studies, libraries and winter gardens. Sculpture gradually became an inseparable part of a refined St Petersburg interior. In artistic standard, many of these marble statues and groups were not inferior to the works exhibited at that time in the Imperial Hermitage, but they were known only to a narrow circle of citizens of the Russian capital. For example, in 1802 a statue of Cupid and the group Cupid and Psyche by Antonio Canova were delivered to Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov at his palace on the Fontanka, while in 1815 Emperor Alexander I acquired four works by the same Italian sculptor for the Hermitage collection. 

Besides the creations of Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), the most famous sculptors of the Neo-Classical period, the palaces of St Petersburg contained works by their gifted pupils and followers – Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869) and Luigi Bienamé (1795–1878), Rinaldo Rinaldi (1793–1873) and John Gibson (1790–1866), Christian Daniel Rauch (1777–1857) and Emil Wolff (1802–1879), Boris Orlovsky (1797–1837), Alexander Loganovsky (1812–1855) and many other celebrated Western European and Russian figures of the 19th century. 

The statues and sculptural groups that belonged to members of the imperial family and the St Petersburg nobility in the mid-1800s were most often acquired in Italy and Germany. It was in those countries that Emperor Nicholas I purchased the “latest sculpture”, both for the New Hermitage and as gifts.  Among them was the Danaid created by Rauch in 1839 and presented to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna by her husband in 1840. The display includes works of sculpture specially commissioned and purchased in Italy in 1838–39 for the collection of the heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Alexander II), and also the sculpture Cupid with Attributes of Hercules by Emil Wolff that was bought in 1859 for his son, Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich.

The statue of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna created to a special commission from Emperor Nicholas I has an interesting history. The sculpture by Karl Friedrich Wichmann (1775–1836) was lost in the great Winter Palace fire of 1837 and recreated by the Russian sculptor Dmitry Savelyevich Savelyev in 1840. 

The Mariinsky Palace, which belonged to the family of Nicholas I’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, was embellished with marble works by Canova, Rauch, Wolff and other 19th-century sculptors. 
Visitors to Baron Alexander von Stieglitz’s mansion on the English Embankment could see works by celebrated sculptors – Thorvaldsen, Wolff and Bienamé. The exhibition includes Emil Wolff's marble group Thetis that belonged to Stieglitz in the 1870s and adorned the drawing-room of his residence. 

The bust of a Faun in the display was brought to St Petersburg in the early 1830s, when it was considered to be by Michelangelo (now it is attributed to his contemporary Baccio Bandinelli). After passing through several hands in St Petersburg, in the 1860s the Faun came into the home of Count Pavel Sergeyevich Stroganov, under whose will it entered the Hermitage in 1912.

Watercolours by Eduard Hau, Konstantin Ukhtomsky, Luigi Premazzi, Ivan Volsky and Jules Mayblum that recorded rooms in the Winter, Mikhailovsky, Mariinsky and Novo-Mikhailovsky Palaces, the apartments in the residences of Count Stroganov and Baron Stieglitz, today make it possible to see lost or inaccessible interiors and also to appreciate the quantity and variety of the sculpture, as well as the different ways it was placed in 19th-century interiors.

The exhibition has been prepared by the Department of Western European Fine Art (headed by Sergei Olegovich Androsov, Doctor of Art Studies). The exhibition curators are Yelena Ivanovna Karcheva, Candidate of Art Studies, senior researcher, and Yekaterina Mikhailovna Orekhova, junior researcher in the Department of Western European Fine Art. An illustrated scholarly catalogue, “Created by a Hand with but a Chisel Armed…” Sculpture in St Petersburg’s Palaces in the Nineteenth Century (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2016), has been produced for the exhibition. The descriptions in the catalogue have been written by members of the State Hermitage staff: Sergei Androsov, Mikhail Dedinkin, Yelena Karcheva, Yekaterina Orekhova, A.V. Solovyev, I.O. Sychev and E.A. Tarasova.