Collectors in St Petersburg

Peter the Great called his city 'the window on Europe'. In the course of the eighteenth century, many prestigious St Petersburg palaces were filled with extensive collections of Western European art. Private collectors proudly showed off their paintings: students from the Academy of Fine Arts came to copy Old Masters, and other collectors came to admire their rivals' collections. Until the 1917 Revolution, St Petersburg was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. In the nineteenth century, the city expanded rapidly as a result of industrialisation and growing prosperity. The arts flourished: art dealers did good business and more and more rich inhabitants of the city put together large collections. This book introduces the private collectors of nineteenth-century St Petersburg for the first time, and focuses on four collectors in particular, each with their own preference for a particular school, country or period - 'old masters', paintings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, or contemporary art from the mid-nineteenth century. Featuring masterpieces by Delacroix, Boucher, Rousseau and Murillo among others, it presents a fascinating picture of collecting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in St Petersburg.