A few years later, in 1769, Catherine scored a coup when the famous Dresden collection of the late Count Heinrich von Brühl, minister of foreign affairs to Augustus II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, came on the market. She paid 180,000 rubles to acquire the collection, which included four more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and five works by Rubens. The paintings were delivered by sea, up the Baltic and into the Neva River, where the ships tied up at the Winter Palace quay only fifty feet from the palace doors. For the next quarter of a century, this was a frequent sight in St. Petersburg: vessels from France, Holland, and England lying against the quay, unloading packing crates and boxes containing paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Franz Hals, and Van Dycks. Inside the palace, Catherine had the crates opened in her presence alone so as to see and judge them first. As the containers were unpacked and the paintings emerged and were propped against the walls, she stood in front of them and walked back and forth studying them, trying to understand them. In her first years of collecting, Catherine valued the paintings she bought less for their visual beauty or artistic technique than for their intellectual and narrative content and for the notice and prestige their acquisition conferred on her.
On March 25, 1771, the empress surprised Europe again by buying the famous collection of Pierre Crozat, which, since the collector’s death, had passed through many hands. It included eight works by Rembrandt, four by Veronese, a dozen by Rubens, seven by Van Dyck, and several by Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The entire collection came to her with a single exception: Van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I of England, who had been beheaded by Oliver Cromwell. Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, bought this painting because she was convinced that she had Stuart blood. Catherine was pleased when Diderot told her that he had succeeded in acquiring the collection for half its value. Four months later in the same year, Catherine bought 150 paintings from the collection of the Duc de Choiseul. Again, Diderot, who arranged the purchase, estimated that she had paid less than half the market value.
In 1773, Diderot and Grimm both came to St. Petersburg. Once back in France, Grimm took over Diderot’s role as Catherine’s agent in Paris. She felt more at ease with Grimm; Diderot, like Voltaire, seemed to her a great man who had to be handled carefully; Grimm was a clever, congenial man with whom she exchanged an informal correspondence of more than fifteen hundred letters. Grimm spread his net wide on Catherine’s behalf: it was Grimm, for example, who acquired for her a copy of the sculptor Houdon’s extraordinarily lifelike statue of a seated Voltaire. The original is now in the Comédie Française; Catherine’s copy is in the Hermitage Museum.
In 1778, the empress received news from her ambassador in London that George Walpole, the spendthrift grandson and heir of Sir Robert Walpole, intended to sell the family’s collection of paintings. Robert Walpole, a Whig who had been prime minister for more than twenty years under George I and George II, had been a lifelong collector of paintings. For thirty-three years, since Robert Walpole’s death, they had been hanging in the family home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Walpole’s grandson, in order to pay his debts and support his passion for raising greyhounds, had decided to sell the entire collection, the finest and most famous private art collection in England, and among the finest in the world. There were almost two hundred paintings, including Rembrandt’s
The consequence was a storm of public indignation in England. That a foreign empress should be allowed to buy and carry away a British national treasure was intolerable. More than a collection of paintings was being removed from the country; a whole chapter of British history and culture was being shipped away. Horace Walpole, the writer and aesthete who was the grandson’s uncle, had always coveted the collection and expected that one day it would come to him. He called what had happened a “theft.” If he couldn’t have the paintings, he said, “I would rather they were sold to the crown of England than to that of Russia, where they will be burned in a wooden palace at the first insurrection.” A public subscription campaign to buy back the paintings failed. Catherine was never worried. Writing to Grimm, she said, “The Walpole paintings are longer to be had for the simple reason that your humble servant has already got her claws on them and will no more let them go than a cat would a mouse.”
