CATHERINE, THE GREATEST. SELFPOLISHED DIAMOND OF THE HERMITAGE. THE LAST WOMAN TO RULE RUSSIA

‘Here lies Catherine the Great born in Stettin on 21 April 1729. In the year 1744, she went to Russia to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth and the nation. She stopped at nothing to achieve this. Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books of all sorts. When she came to the throne of Russia, she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty and prosperity to her subjects. She forgave easily and hated no one. She was good-natured, easy-going, cheerful, and had a republican spirit and a good heart. She made friends, took pleasure in her work, loved art and was sociable by nature.’

The empress wrote this mock epitaph for herself shortly before her sixtieth birthday.

In her day, Catherine was considered a great authority. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who corresponded with her, called her ‘the shining star of the North’. The French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur, spoke of her exceptional talents, her keen intellect, her greatness and her charm. She was intelligent and energetic, possessed subtle insight into human nature and knew how to win people over to her side. She surrounded herself with devoted and talented individuals and used their gifts for the good of the state. But her contemporaries also saw the dark side of her personality. Emperor Joseph II, the ruler of Austria, once wrote, ‘Vanity is her idol; success and flattery have spoiled her.’ The French Baron Corberon added, ‘Catherine is a hypocrite without equal! She is pious, gentle, proud, majestic, kind – but deep in her heart, she is true to herself alone and pursues only her own interests, resorting to any means necessary to achieve them.’
Sophia Auguste Frederika van Anhalt-Zerbst, the daughter of a German princeling, became – in defiance of all logic – the Empress of Russia and Europe's most powerful ruler. Catherine had no official claim to the throne, yet she held sway over the vast Russian Empire for more than thirty-five years, from 1762 to 1796. Her reign was undeniably a time of stability, an period of national power and glory and a golden age in the history of the Russian court. Like Peter I, she acquired the title 'the Great' during her lifetime.

Her childhood

Sophia was born in a merchant’s house in Stettin on 21 April 1729, to Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst and Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. She had a younger brother, Wilhelm Christian, and a younger sister, Elisabeth. Sophia was an inquisitive and very energetic child. She soon proved to be a born leader, taking control of her afternoon games with neighbour children. Her governess, Babet Cardel, taught her French and exposed her to the work of Corneille, Racine and Molière. As a child, she was dominated by her strict mother, who regarded Sophia as a proud, rebellious girl to be forced into submission and married off to a suitable husband. Sophia’s mother saw her eldest daughter as ugly and impertinent, and favoured her son, giving him preferential treatment. At the age of ten, Sophia was introduced to Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp, a distant cousin. The two of them seemed made for each other; years later, they were married.

Art and propaganda

Catherine was seriously involved in architectural projects and in collecting art – at first, mainly paintings. Her first major purchase, in 1764, was of 317 paintings from the collection of the rich Berlin merchant and businessman Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. She snatched away these paintings from Frederick the Great, who had been the intended buyer but could not pay for them at that time. Catherine’s purchase was the first step towards the foundation of the Hermitage.
From 1766 onwards, she regularly bought large collections of art works with the help of expert advisors such as her representatives in Europe – Count Alexander Stroganov, Count Ivan Shuvalov and Prince Dmitry Golitsyn – and her foreign friends Friedrich Melchior von Grimm and Denis Diderot. She purchased works by all the great painters of the day and of earlier periods. The exhibition includes works that she acquired by Reni, Pittoni, Van Dyck, Teniers the Younger, Greuze and Mengs. Not all her purchases made it into the Hermitage. In a tragic incident in 1771, paintings she had bought from the Braamcamp collection were lost in a shipwreck of the coast on Finland. These included works by Brueghel, Ter Borch and Steen. Catherine's greatest personal passion was collecting cameos. By 1794, she owned more than 10,000 of them. A few dozen remarkable examples are included in the exhibition. During Catherine’s reign, St Petersburg became a stately city, and the opulent baroque style made way for the dignified restraint of classicism. Palaces, churches and government buildings popped up everywhere, and intellectual life flourished. In 1783, the Russian Academy was founded in St Petersburg as a centre of Russian linguistics. The Academy’s first president was a woman, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, Catherine’s long-time ally. That same year saw the construction of the Bolshoy or Great Theatre, later subsumed into the Mariinsky Theatre. Catherine closely monitored the activities of many educational institutions, regarding the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts founded under Elizabeth as critical to the evolution of Russian culture. 
During her reign, art became a powerful tool for political propaganda. The successes of her foreign policies found full expression in the work of the great artists of her day, as did another theme close to Catherine's heart: her status as the successor to Peter the Great. She expected works of art not only to glorify her reign, but also to create an image of her as an enlightened monarch and the ruler of one of Europe's most powerful states.

Her favourites

Favouritism was not limited to the Russian court. In that respect, Catherine was a child of her time. Despite the many legends, Catherine did not have that many favourite men in her life. Most of them played a pivotal role, both private and politically.
Her great favourite was Grigory Potemkin, for whom she always had the greatest affection and respect, even after their relationship ended. Potemkin was a leading statesman. As commander-in-chief, he led the Russian military to great victory over Turkey and pushed the country’s borders further south. He was one of the few people Catherine fully trusted and who really supported her. Potemkin’s death in 1791 was a great blow for Catherine. ‘From now on, the burden of government is solely on my shoulders’.

In the 1790s, Catherine's health went into decline; she became corpulent and short of breath and had difficulty walking, but still worked hard. She usually spent the summer in her beloved residence of Tsarskoye Selo, often strolling through the palace park with her favourite dogs. She dressed very simply. The French painter Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun had this memory of the empress a year before she died: ‘I was at first extremely surprised to find her short; I had imagined her a great height – something like her renown. She was very stout, but still had a handsome face, which her white hair framed to perfection. Genius seemed to have its seat on her broad, high forehead. Her eyes were soft and small, her nose was quite Greek, her complexion lively, and her features very mobile. Catherine, the Greatest died of a stroke in November 1796 at the age of 67.

https://www.hermitage.nl/en/tentoonstellingen/catherine_the_great/backgroundstory.htm