Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, idolized her father, but she had never erected what Catherine considered an appropriate monument to him. Now Catherine, not born a Russian but hoping to be accepted as the great tsar’s true political heir, decided that there should be a supreme visual tribute to the figure who had made Russia a great European power. She considered herself, a daughter of Europe coming to Russia eighteen years after Peter’s death, as resuming his journey to civilization and greatness. She wanted Russians to understand and accept this connection between them.
Because she believed that no one in Russia had sufficient talent to do the work she wanted done, she instructed her ambassador in Paris, then Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to find a French sculptor to design and cast a heroic equestrian statue in bronze. The price originally offered was 300,000 livres. Golitsyn approached three well-known French sculptors; they asked 450,000, 400,000, and 600,000 livres. Golitsyn then spoke to his friend Diderot, and Diderot spoke to the sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, director of the sculpture workshop of the Royal Sèvres porcelain factory. Falconet seemed an unlikely candidate. The son of a poor carpenter, he was considered competent but not brilliantly talented. Although Catherine had told Golitysn and Diderot that her monument was to be on a grand scale, Falconet was known for his small figures in porcelain, greatly admired by Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour. At fifty-one, he had never worked on a large scale. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Diderot’s persuasion, accepted the empress’s offer, and agreed to work for 25,000 livres per year, saying that he was ready to devote eight years to the work. In fact, he remained in Russia for twelve years.
Falconet arrived in St. Petersburg in 1766, and Catherine greeted him enthusiastically. It pleased her that Falconet had asked less in payment than the sum offered and far less than others had asked. Although in Paris Falconet had a reputation for a prickly ego, once he reached St. Petersburg and began working on the first clay models of the statue he seemed in constant need of his patron’s approval. Catherine obliged by showing him not only enthusiasm but deference. In 1767, when Falconet submitted his first design for the statue of Peter, she protested her lack of knowledge and excused herself from expressing an opinion. She recommended that the artist rely on his own judgment and the probable views of posterity. Falconet argued back, “My posterity is Your Majesty. The other may come when it will.”
“Not at all,” Catherine replied. “How can you submit yourself to my opinion. I do not even know how to draw. The merest schoolboy knows more about sculpture than I do.”
Pleased by the value the empress placed on his judgement, Falconet began to offer advice on the paintings that Diderot was buying and sending. His comments were often obsequious. “What a charming picture,” he wrote of a painting by a lesser-known artist. “What magnificent brushwork! What beautiful tones! What a sweet little head of Aphrodite! What an admirable consistency!” Concerning another painting, he said, “We should fall on our knees before it. Anyone who dares to think otherwise has neither faith nor morals. After all, I do know something about it; it is practically my profession.” To which Catherine replied, “I think you are right. I am well aware of the reason I cannot approve. It is because I don’t understand enough to see in it all that you do.” Often, after taking a private first look at her new paintings, Catherine wanted to share them with Falconet. “My paintings are beautiful,” she wrote about one arriving shipment. “When would you like to come and see them?”
Catherine may have assumed an ignorance of art, but in imagining her statue of Peter, she knew what she wanted. Falconet had never hoped to work on the scale that the empress was demanding, but her high expectations elevated his design and effort. In order to help him understand the appearance and movements of a rearing horse, the empress made available two of her favorite animals, along with their trainers, who could make them rear as the artist wished. Meanwhile, Falconet’s apprentice, eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne Collot, who had come with him from Paris, began working on the head and face of the tsar, using Peter’s death mask and the portraits available. She remained in Russia as long as Falconet and later married the sculptor’s artist son who came to visit.
