The Empress of Art by Susan Jaques

Author:Susan Jaques
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2016-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

A ROSE WITHOUT THORNS

In the summer of 1784, an unusual group of passengers disembarked a small ship in the middle of St. Petersburg. In the name of the empress of all the Russias, some sixty Scottish stonemasons, plasterers, smiths, and bricklayers had answered a help wanted ad in the Edinburgh Evening Courant. Shortly after their arrival, William and George Lyon wrote home to their mother:

“There is no posibily [possibility] of getting any money raised at present as the Empres only pais 4 times in the year,” wrote the Lyon brothers. “Than she pais it in great sooms [sums]. It is out of Mr. Cameron’s own poket that we are subsisted till the end of the quarter. The Empres is pleased just now to give us a chance of a prize which wil be drawen by lotry tikets. The prize is a hous which the Empres means throw curiosity to give away. This hous is valued about 4000 roubles. . . . All that 15 miles betwixt Petersburgh and the sumar palace is ful of lamps on both sides of the road and large marrable pillars at the end of every mile. . . .”1

It was just five years since Mr. Cameron had made the same voyage. Desperate for skilled craftsmen to help execute his royal commissions, the Scot advertised for a group of his compatriots and built their families a street of cottages in Sophia. Now he was anxious to get them started on Pavlovsk, a country villa two and a half miles from Tsarskoe Selo.

The forested nine-hundred-acre property on the Slavianka River, formerly Romanov hunting grounds, was a gift from Catherine to Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna to celebrate the birth of their son Alexander in December 1777. In 1778, Catherine built the couple two small wood residences—Paullust (Paul’s Consolation) and Marienthal (Maria’s Valley), along with a road several years later connecting Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo. With the birth of their second son, Constantine, that year, the couple approached Catherine about bankrolling a larger residence. “Dear children,” the empress replied. “You may well imagine how disagreeable it is to me to see You in need; people must be constantly stealing from You, and this is why You are in need despite wanting for nothing. Farewell, I embrace You.”2

Catherine did lend the couple her favorite architect. On the afternoon of May 25, 1782, a priest led the traditional Russian service for the laying of a foundation stone. Charles Cameron and his future father-in-law, Tsarskoe Selo’s English gardener John Bush, were in attendance along with a group of construction workers. After the ceremony, participants helped themselves to several buckets of vodka and barrels of beers. Missing from the service were the property owners, who’d left the previous fall on a fourteen-month European grand tour. At Catherine’s insistence, they traveled under the pseudonyms Comte and Comtesse du Nord.

Catherine was thrilled to have her young grandsons to herself and used their parents’ absence as an opportunity to have them inoculated against smallpox.

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