Friday, 5 April 2024 to Sunday, 7 April 2024

Taste, Empire, and British-Russian Relations: New Research on Russian Decorative Art at Dorich House Museum

Fri5 Apr05:00pm(15 mins)
Where:
CWB Syndicate 2
Presenter:

Authors

Louise Hardiman11 Independent Scholar, UK

Discussion

In the 1840s, the St Petersburg workshops of Pavel Semechkin and Konstantin Terebenev adopted the English craft technique of transfer printing engraved images on to glass (later termed “decalcomania” or “decal”) to create new luxury objects for a growing market in the Russian Empire for decorative art. Their nationally themed creations included a range of beakers with depictions of the imperial family. Among these were coloured and plain editions of a pair of works with silvered images of Emperor Nicholas I and his consort Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Charlotte of Prussia), of which Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, holds an example of the latter. The royal portrait presents the empress within a laurel wreath embellished with the imperial double-headed eagle and further encircled by an array of furled banners. As well as incorporating these visual symbols of imperialism, the applied images draw from earlier works that testify to British-Russian artistic exchange during the early nineteenth century: engravings by Thomas Wright (1792-1849), who worked in the Russian Empire from 1822-1826 and 1830-1845, and an oil on canvas portrait of the empress by George Dawe, the English portraitist known for his series of several hundred military portraits for the Winter Palace (copies of which Wright also engraved). Taking as case studies this object and other works of Russian decorative art at Dorich House, my paper sheds new light on British-Russian cultural contacts and the taste among the elite for English art during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, as well as the use of the decorative arts by rulers in both empires to construct visual narratives of power. It links my recent research into the museum's collection, funded by the Decorative Arts Society, with earlier scholarship on British-Russian artistic exchange during the period of Catherine II to highlight the persistence of Russian Anglophilia during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Hosted By

Event Logo

Get the App

Get this event information on your mobile by
going to the Apple or Google Store and search for 'myEventflo'
iPhone App
Android App
www.myeventflo.com/2517