After Cameron, Catherine’s favorite architect was Giacomo Quarenghi, an Italian also designing and building in neoclassical style. Quarenghi arrived in Russia in 1780, two years after Cameron. He began by designing the neoclassical Palladian Theater at the Litttle Hermitage, decorating it with marble columns and statues of playwrights and composers. Quarenghi also designed the austere Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo for Catherine’s beloved grandson Alexander, who became Tsar Alexander I. A century later this palace became the country home of Catherine’s great-great-great-grandson, Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family.
Not all of the artists encouraged and supported by Catherine came from abroad. The best Russian students at the Academy of Art were being sent abroad in groups of twelve at state expense to spend two, four, or more years studying in France, Italy, or Germany. The greatest portraitists of Catherine’s time were both Ukrainians, Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky; Borovikovsky’s best-known portrait depicts an elderly Catherine walking her dog in the park of Tsarskoe Selo. Another Russian-born artist of Catherine’s day was the architect Georg Friedrich Velten, whose father had come to Russia as Peter the Great’s master cook. The younger Velten studied architecture abroad and, on returning, was commissioned to remove the wooden quays along the Neva River and to face the embankments with Finnish granite. The architectural continuity of this work, stretching for twenty-four miles along the river, gave the waterfront a stately elegance. At the same time, the solid granite quays served as landing stages where both river traffic and seagoing vessels could tie up and discharge cargo.
If Catherine sought straight, pure classical lines in her buildings, she wanted the opposite in her parks and gardens. When she transformed the formal Dutch and French gardens at Tsarskoe Selo, her adviser and chief gardener was John Busch, an Englishman of Hanoverian origin, who spoke to the empress in German. Busch’s language ability had been useful when he was cast as the German “innkeeper” during Emperor Joseph II’s visit to Tsarskoe Selo as “Count Falkenstein.” Busch retained the post of gardener for years, and when he retired, he was succeeded by his son, Joseph. Busch also found himself related to Cameron. On arriving in Tsarskoe Selo, the Scottish architect, speaking no Russian or French, moved into Busch’s house; eventually, he married Busch’s daughter.
Catherine helped design the new park. She liked flowers, shrubs, monuments, obelisks, triumphal arches, canals, and winding paths, and Busch laid these out for her. She wrote to Voltaire, “Now I love to distraction gardens in the English style, the curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes … and I hold in contempt straight lines.… I hate fountains that torture water and force it into a course contrary to its nature.… In a word, Anglomania rules my plantomania.” At the end of her working day, she walked in the park in a plain dress, exercising her dogs and mingling with the public, which, if decently dressed, was freely admitted. It was in the park at Tsarskoe Selo that Alexander Pushkin set the penultimate scene in his story of the Pugachev rebellion,
It was not simply her unmatched collection of paintings or the elegant neoclassical palaces she built for herself and others that made Catherine’s reputation as a patron of the arts. The single most famous artistic work produced in Russia during her reign was Étienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Since its unveiling in 1782, this unique masterpiece, commissioned by Catherine in a deliberate effort to assert her claim to the legacy of the greatest of Russian tsars, has stood for two and a quarter centuries on the bank of the Neva River in the middle of the city Peter founded.
