My latest article: Fabergé eggs and King Willem-Alexander

Easter will soon be upon us, and in the April issue of Majesty (Vol. 38, No. 4) I mark the occasion with an article on the imperial Fabergé eggs, the splendid works of art that were created as Easter eggs for the Russian empresses Maria Fyodorovna and Alexandra Fyodorovna, a tradition that, along with the Russian monarchy, came to an end 100 years ago this year.
As April will also see the fiftieth birthday of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (on 27 April) I have also contributed a profile of him. The magazine went on sale in Britain two weeks ago and is on sale in Norway from today.

At the road's end: Prince Nicholas Romanov (1922-2014), head of the Romanov Family Assocation

It has been reported that Prince Nicholas Romanov, the head of the Romanov Family Assocation, died on Monday, shortly before his 92nd birthday. A great-great-grandson of Emperor Nikolay I of Russia, Nicholas Romanov was the eldest son of Prince Roman Petrovich of Russia and Countess Praskovia Sheremeteva.
Born on 26 September 1922, he grew up in France and Italy, where he actively opposed the Fascist regime during the Second World War. He eventually acquired Italian citizenship and married an Italian, Countess Sveva della Gherardesca, in 1951. The couple had three daughters.
Nicholas Romanov worked as a businessman and farmer, eventually settling in Switzerland. He paid his first visit to Russia in 1992, the year after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1979 he was co-founder of the Romanov Family Assocation, which organises male-line descendants of the House of Romanov. Nicholas Romanov was vice president from its founding until he succeeded Prince Vasili Alexandrovich in 1989.
Under the rules in force when Russia was a monarchy Nicholas Romanov, being born of an unequal marriage, would have had no succession rights. However, the Romanov Family Assocation has, if I understand it correctly, claimed that these rules have been so to speak suspended since the execution of the last Emperor in 1918, claiming that the rights of the princes who contracted unequal marriages were not renounced as there was no emperor to demand their renuncations.
Nicholas Romanov's claim to head the Romanovs was disputed by Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who assumed the headship of the imperial family upon the death of her father Vladimir Kirillovich in 1992, claiming that there were no male dynasts left.

My latest articles: Queen Margrethe, Elsa Cedergren and three reviews

In mid-January Queen Margrethe II of Denmark will celebrate her forty years on the throne with three days of festivities. On occasion of the jubilee I have written an article titled “Renaissance Queen”, which deals with what I consider some of the most interesting aspects of her reign and which appears in the January issue of the British monthly magazine Majesty (Vol. 33, No. 1), published on 20 December.
Also out just before Christmas was this year’s final issue of Royalty Digest Quarterly (no 4 – 2011), which includes my biographical article on the humanitarian and activist Elsa Cedergren (1893-1996), the youngest daughter of Prince Oscar Bernadotte and sister of the famous Folke Bernadotte. It seems Elsa Cedergren is now primarily remembered for having been the (so far) only Bernadotte to reach the age of 100, but there were certainly much else of interest about her.
To the same magazine I have also contributed reviews of Philip Eade’s excellent Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life and Ilana D. Miller’s The Four Graces: Queen Victoria’s Hessian Granddaughters. (Concerning the latter title the editor has, curiously, chosen to add a second “review” by Charlotte Zeepvat, who appears to be a friend of the author and is thanked profusely in the book’s preface for her help and support.)
The Society for Court Studies has also brought out this year’s second issue of their journal The Court Historian (Volume 16, 2), which contains several very interesting articles and to which I have been happy to contribute a review article about the exhibition “Härskarkonst – Napoleon, Karl Johan, Alexander” (“Staging Power – Napoleon, Charles John, Alexander”), which was held at the National Museum in Stockholm from September 2010 to January 2011.
These bring the total number of my published works this year up to nineteen, consisting of seven topical or biographical articles, four op-eds, six reviews, one obituary and one letter to the editor.

People from the past: Iver Winfeldt Buch, Norwegian court jeweller in St Petersburg

This week is the last chance to see the Norwegian National Museum’s exhibition “Sacral Treasures from the Kremlin Museums in Moscow”, which blends the Norwegian museum’s unusual collection of Russian icons with loans from the Kremlin, such as further icons, priestly vestments and precious items used during the liturgy in the imperial cathedrals.
While the many Swedes who left their mark on St Petersburg are fairly well-known, this exhibition reminds us of one the less well-known Norwegians who were also active in the capital of imperial Russia.
Included in the exhibition are two items made by the court jeweller Iver Winfeldt Buch (1749-1811). The picture above (a press photo copyright of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design) shows one of them, a golden chalice set with 435 diamonds and three gems showing the birth of Jesus, the baptism of Jesus and the removal of the Virgin Mary’s house to Loreto – possibly from Ekaterina II’s own collection of gems. The chalice was commissioned by the Empress in 1795 and presented to the Monastery of St Sergey.
Iver Winfeldt Buch was born in Drammen in 1749. He came to St Petersburg in 1770 and was received into the guild of foreign gold and silver smiths in 1776. According to a family legend related by his relative Ada Polak, a renowned Norwegian art historian who died in London last autumn at the age of 96, Buch first worked for a court jeweller who was exiled to Siberia after he had exchanged one of the largest diamonds in an imperial tiara with an imitation while he was repairing it.
Buch is said to have taken over his workshop and eventually came to own one of the largest such stores in the Russian capital. He was appointed court jeweller to Ekaterina II and later to Pavel I.
Prince Potemkin was also among his customers and following Potemkin’s death Empress Ekaterina II presented the Monastery of St Alexander in St Petersburg with another jewelled chalice by Buch in commemoration of the Prince. In addition to liturgical items he is known to have made jewellery, silver furniture and chandeliers for the imperial palaces.
He was appointed consul for Denmark-Norway in St Petersburg and visited Norway again in 1804. He died in 1811, supposedly in poverty, having spent his fortune on his passion for long journeys.

New books: Nikolaj II of Finland

It is not very often that I read Finnish books, the obvious explanation being the utterly incomprehensible Finnish language. But occasionally Finnish books are also published in the minority language Swedish, which is the case with Jorma and Päivi Tuomi-Nikula’s new biography Nikolaj II – Storfursten av Finland about the last Grand Prince of Finland, perhaps better known as Emperor Nikolaj II of Russia.
201 years ago Russia defeated Sweden and took Finland, which became an autonomous Grand Duchy (Grand Principality would have been a more accurate English translation) under the Russian Emperor. In their book, the Tuomi-Nikulas have wanted to look at who the person Nikolaj II was and to weave this together with the history of his reign in Finland. They have succeeded in producing a highly readable as well as informative biography.
The story of Nikolaj II’s life is well-known from a multitude of books published in the 92 years since his execution, but few of his previous biographers have given much thought to Finland.
The authors argue that the popularity of the emperors had never been greater in Finland than in 1894, a year which had seen the festive unveiling of the statue of the beloved Alexander II in Helsinki, followed by mourning for Alexander III and rejoicing for the new emperor. Nikolaj II had already visited Finland five times before his accession and his promise to respect Finland’s autonomy and privileges was well-received by the Finns. But only five years later, the Finns would utter the name of Nikolaj II as a curse.
There was soon disappointment that the new emperor did not follow his father’s tradition of holidaying in Finland every summer, but the greatest trouble was caused by the attempts at integrating Finland more fully into the Russian Empire.
This policy was to be carried out by Nikolaj Ivanovich Bobrikov, who was appointed Governor-General of Finland in 1898. Bobrikov intended to introduce Russian laws in Finland and to make sure that Russian was the language used in public administration. In 1899 the Emperor issued a manifesto saying that he could make decisions about laws regarding mutual Finnish and Russian concerns without consulting the Finnish national assembly. This was seen as contradicting the promise he gave upon his accession to respects the laws of Finland and 1899 entered Finnish history as the year of the violation of the oath.
He followed up by banning separate Finnish stamps from being used and the abolishment of a separate Finnish army in 1900, which meant that Finnish soldiers could now be sent anywhere on behalf of Russia. In 1903 Bobrikov was given dictatorial powers for three years, which meant that he could ban meetings, dissolve associations and exile people as he pleased.
The assassination of Bobrikov in June 1904 (the murderer was hailed as a national hero) was followed by a wave of political murders and crimes. But the Finns also found more peaceful and cleverer ways of making their point – such as telling Bobrikov that the façade of the House of the Estates needed to be repaired, only to put up a relief showing Alexander I in his role as the Emperor who had granted Finland its privileges, which the Governor-General could not really protest against.
Or they covered the statue of Alexander II (“the liberator”) in flowers as a silent protest at the current Russian policy. Bobrikov forbade the press to print photos of the flower-bedecked monument, but the Finns issued the photos as postcard. One of the best of the many excellent illustrations in this book is such a postcard, where a group of people “happens” to be standing next to the monument smiling gleefully at the photographer.
The wave of politically motivated crime around 1905 was eventually followed by a détente, which coincided with the smaller Russian revolution of 1905 and increasing acts of terrorism on Russian soil. This caused the imperial family finally to begin to spend their summer holidays in Finland, which they continued to do until 1914 – the authors point out the irony in Nikolaj II accusing the Finns in his speech from the throne in 1908 of not being friendly enough towards Russia and its government while at the same time realising that Finland was the part of his realm where he was probably most safe.
However, the détente did not last. In 1909 Nikolaj II dissolved the Finnish national assembly as a reaction to its Speaker Pehr Evind Svinhufvud having criticised the way the Russian government dealt with Finnish matter and in 1910 he issued a manifesto which gave all Russian citizens the same rights in Finland as Finns, which was seen as another attempt at russification of Finland.
The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 saw the Dowager Empress Maria Fjodorovna, who described herself as “Finland’s best and most faithful friend” and had been staunchly opposed to her son’s Finnish policy, travelling back to St Petersburg through Finland and being greeted with ovations and great warmth by the Finns. This, the authors write, was also a reminder to the Emperor that he might have shared in his mother’s popularity were it not for his repressive acts against Finland.
However, the outbreak of war led to the Finns’ old loyalty towards the Emperor being re-awakened, but this did not last to the end of the year, when plans for russifying Finland entirely were revealed. From then on the name of Nikolaj II again became a curse and it was widely hoped in Finland that Germany would defeat Russia.
In March 1915 Nikolaj II visited Helsinki for a single day. He would never see the Grand Duchy again. The Finns declared their independence on 6 December 1917 and were recognised by Lenin on 30 December. Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse-Cassel was elected King of Finland, but he renounced his throne following the German defeat in WWI without ever having set foot in his kingdom.
The authors show sympathy in their portrayal of Nikolaj II, but make no secret of his failures and shortcomings. Altogether they have succeeded in writing a book which deepens one’s understanding both of why Russian rule over Finland failed and why the Romanov dynasty did not survive.

Several exhibitions on royal history this autumn

I have just returned from Stockholm, where the National Museum was busy getting everything in place for their grand exhibition “Härskarkonst – Napoleon, Karl Johan, Alexander” (“Staging Power – Napoleon, Karl Johan, Alexander”), which will be opened by King Carl Gustaf tomorrow in the presence of former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
The exhibition is expected to be the highlight of the Bernadotte bicentenary and will look at Emperor Napoléon I of France’s, King Carl XIV Johan of Sweden and Norway’s and Emperor Alexander I of Russia’s relations to art and how they used the arts to strengthen their own positions. More than 400 works of art – paintings, costumes, jewellery, furniture and more – are included in this exhibition.
Some examples worth mentioning are Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting of Napoléon crossing the Alps, a leaf from the golden wreath with which Napoléon crowned himself emperor and the magnificent emerald necklace which was given to Stéphanie de Beauharnais when she married the future Grand Duke of Baden in 1805.
A richly illustrated catalogue, in Swedish and English versions, is available from the National Museum from this week. The exhibition will last until 23 January and will thereafter be shown in a modified version at the State Hermitage in St Petersburg.
The National Museum’s exhibition of Bernadotte portraits, “Bernadotter i svart och vitt” (“The Bernadottes in Black and White”), which opened in June, also remains open until 23 January, but on the coming Sunday some of the exhibited photos will be replaced with others (for preservation reasons).
It was earlier reported that the Royal Collection would show an exhibition on Carl XIV Johan’s family life at the Royal Palace in Stockholm from 1 October, but this has been postponed to 2 December.
There will however be several other exhibitions related to royal history to be seen this autumn. The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace has just extended their magnificent “Victoria & Albert: Art & Love”, which was due to close on 31 October, to 5 December.
As earlier mentioned the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Palace in Copenhagen will stage an exhibition to mark the 350th anniversary of the introduction of absolute monarchy in Denmark-Norway, while Rosenborg Palace in Copenhagen will hold the exhibition “Pomp og pragt - Kongemagt og enevælde” (“Pomp and Splendour - Royal Power and Absolute Monarchy”) on the same topic. The exhibition at Frederiksborg will run from 16 October to 20 February, while Rosenborg’s lasts from 16 October to 27 February.
A book related to these two exhibitions has also just been published by Gads Forlag of Copenhagen. Magt og pragt – Enevælde 1660-1848 is written by the noted historians Thomas Lyngby, Søren Mentz and Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen.
On the coming Saturday the Amalienborg Museum in Copenhagen will inaugurate their new exhibition “Den elegante fornyer” (“The Elegant Reformer”), which is a belated commemoration of the centenary of Queen Ingrid’s birth in March. This exhibition will close on the late Queen’s birthday, 28 March 2011. The Danish Royal Collection has by the way just got a new website (external link), which is a significant improvement on the old one.
In Antwerp one will soon be able to see the exhibition “Voor eer en glorie - Napoleon en de juwelen van het Keizerrijk” (“For Honour and Glory - Napoleon and the Empire’s Jewels”) at the Diamond Museum in Queen Astrid Square. This exhibition on the jewellery of the Napoleonic age will be open from 1 October to 31 December.
Here in Oslo the exhibition “Slottet og Linstow – Den nye hovedstadens grunnstein” (“The Palace and Linstow – The Cornerstone of the New Capital”) at the National Museum’s architecture department is now in its closing days. The exhibition, which is the first since 1922 to be devoted to Hans D. F. Linstow, the city planner and architect of the Royal Palace, will close on 10 October.
Meanwhile another branch of the National Museum, the National Gallery, last week opened “Sakrale skatter fra Kreml-museene i Moskva” (“Sacral Treasures from the Kremlin Museums in Moscow”), which shows some 90 icons, textiles and ritual and liturgical objects used in the imperial cathedrals of Russia. This is said to be the most valuable exhibition ever held at the National Museum. It will stay open until 16 January.
The photo show Grand Duchess Stéphanie Napoléon’s emerald necklace, which is normally kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The press photo is copyright the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Remains of Ivan VI found in Russia?

According to a TT/Inferfax article in Dagens Nyheter yesterday (external link) Russian scientists believe they have found the remains of Emperor Ivan VI in the town of Kholmogory, 75 kilometres southeast of Arkhangelsk.
Ivan VI was the great-grandson of Ivan V, brother and co-monarch of Pyotr I (“Peter the Great”), and succeeded his great-aunt Empress Anna on the Russian imperial throne in October 1740. Thirteen months later he was however overthrown by Jelizaveta Petrovna, Pyotr I’s daughter, and imprisoned with his family.
Eventually he was moved to the fortress in Shlisselburg, where he was murdered during an attempt to free him on 5 July 1764. It has been believed that he was buried in Shlisselburg, but according to one of the Russian scientists quoted in the article, Anatoly Karanin, they are quite certain that the remains found in Kholmogory are his.
Kholmogory was one of the places where Ivan VI had been imprisoned before being moved to Shlisselburg, where his parents died in 1746 and 1776 respectively. His four siblings were released only in 1780 and sent to Denmark, where they lived in Horsens under the supervision of their father’s sister, Queen Dowager Juliane Marie of Denmark-Norway.

At the road’s end: Two imperial deaths

Two nonagenarian members of Europe’s once-great imperial dynasties have died this month:

A spokesman for the Romanov dynasty today announced that Grand Duchess Leonida Georgijevna of Russia died in Madrid last night, aged 95. She was the widow of Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia, who was by many considered the head of the imperial house of Russia, and mother of the current pretender, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirevna.
She belonged by birth to the Bagration dynasty, which reigned in Georgia until 1810. However, the fact that she belonged to the senior branch which had not been reigning since 1505, caused her husband’s rivals for the headship of the Romanov dynasty to argue that their marriage was not in compliance with the imperial rules.
A great-great-granddaughter of the last Duke of Mukhrani, she was born Princess Leonida Bagration-Mukhraneli in Tbilisi on 23 September 1914. The family left the Soviet Union in the early 1920s with the help of Maxim Gorkij.
Her first husband, the American Sumner Moore Kirby, whom she married in 1934 and divorced in 1937, subsequently died while held prisoner in a German concentration camp in 1945. They had one daughter, Helen. She married Grand Duke Vladimir in 1948 and will be buried at his side in St Petersburg.

Archduke Rudolph of Austria-Hungary died in Brussels on 15 May at the age of 90. He was the sixth of the eight children of the last Emperor and Empress of Austria-Hungary, Karl I and Zita, and was born in Prangins, Switzerland on 5 September 1919, less than a year after his family had lost their thrones. He was named for his grandfather’s cousin, the crown prince who famously committed suicide in Mayerling in 1889.
In 1953 he married Countess Xenia Tschernyschev-Besobrasow, with whom he had four children, and following her death in a car accident in 1968 he remarried Princess Anna Gabriele of Wrede, who gave birth to a daughter. Archduke Rudolph made a career in banking.
The death of Archduke Rudolph leaves his elder brothers Otto (aged 97) and Felix (who will be 94 in a week) as the only surviving children of the last Habsburg emperor.

Recent magazine articles on Bernadottes

This month’s issue of the Swedish history magazine Populär Historia (no 3-2010) has an article by journalist Sara Griberg on Princess Maria, the Russian Grand Duchess who was married off to Prince Wilhelm in 1908 and left him five years later.
Although the Grand Duchess lived until 1958, the article concentrates on Maria’s few years in Sweden. Like most Swedes writing about Maria, Griberg uses Maria’s own and her son Lennart Bernadotte’s memoirs as the main sources, but Griberg also considers the differing account given in Bengt Jangfeldt’s biography of Axel Munthe.
She also mentions the Russo-Swedish espionage case which coincided with the royal divorce and which rumours claimed Princess Maria was involved with, but, perhaps naturally for such a format, Sara Griberg does not investigate it further.
The article includes a photo of Maria at work in the fashion industry in Paris in 1923, but it is quite startling to see that the woman standing next to her, dressed in typical 1920s fashion, is identified as Empress Maria Fyodorovna!
The biographer of that Empress, Coryne Hall, has meanwhile published an article of Queen Ingrid in the March issue of the British magazine Majesty (vol 31, no 3), coinciding with the late Queen’s centenary at the end of this month. The article lists the basic biographical facts in a rather dry manner, but not a word is said about Queen Ingrid’s personality.
There is also nothing about her significance or influence, except for a statement that the Act of Succession was changed in Princess Margrethe’s favour “due in no small part to Ingrid’s influence”. In fact this remains an unsubstantiated rumour which has been denied on several occasions.
Much more interesting is an interview in that same magazine with Lady Elizabeth Anson, the step-daughter of Prince Georg of Denmark and great-niece of the late Queen Elizabeth, who runs the company Party Planners. She says she came up with the idea when attending her own coming-out party at the Danish Embassy in London, but that her wish to pursue this career met with strong resistance from Prince Georg, who got her a job as a hotel receptionist instead.
Eventually she did start her own business together with her friend Jessica Scott-Ellis and among her first royal commissions were a cocktail party thrown by her great-aunt for Princess Benedikte of Denmark and the 21st birthday of Prince William of Gloucester. Lady Elizabeth greatly enjoyed working with Patrick Plunket and following his death she was asked to take over his job as Deputy Master of the Household. That she turned down the offer on the spot “was obviously considered very rude” and she was out of royal favour for some years.
In 2000 the Queen Mother did however ask Lady Elizabeth to arrange the huge party at Windsor Castle to celebrate her 100th birthday as well as the 70th birthday of Princess Margaret, 50th of Princess Anne and 40th of the Duke of York. After that she has received many more royal commissions and although she is now 68, she has no plans to retire.

New books: Bernadottes and Romanovs

A book on the Bernadottes and the Romanovs in itself sounds like a good idea. It was the then Crown Prince Carl Johan’s alliance with Emperor Aleksandr I in 1812 which ultimately brought about the union with Norway and which greatly helped secure his position as an upstart monarch. Russia remained a key ally throughout most of Carl XIV Johan’s reign, until his son, Oscar I, broke with his father’s pro-Russian policy by concluding the November Treaty with Britain and France in 1855.
But as the subtitle indicates, the scope of Gunna Wendt’s new book Die Bernadottes und die Romanoffs. Europäische Dynastien auf der Mainau (published by Verlag Huber in Frauenfeld), is narrower than so.
At the centre of her story stands a marital rather than a martial alliance – in fact the only such alliance concluded between the Bernadottes and the Romanovs. In 1908 Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, the second son of King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria, was married off to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, a granddaughter of Emperor Aleksandr II. It was arguably the grandest match the Bernadottes ever made as well as the most disastrous. Princess Maria ran away after five years and divorce followed in 1914. Maria wrote about the marriage with great bitterness in her memoirs, while Wilhelm passed the whole thing over in his.
The fruit of the marriage was an only son, Prince Lennart, who, having lost his royal title by marrying a commoner in 1932, became known as the multi-talented Lennart Bernadotte and lived to a great age – he died on Mainau five years ago this month, aged 95.
This book has been written in connection with the exhibition “100 Jahre Lennart Bernadotte – Zurück zu den Wurzeln”, which was held at Mainau this year to celebrate his centenary. The author, who has earlier written a biography of Lennart Bernadotte’s second wife, Sonja, cooperated with her, Lennart’s cousin Prince Michel Romanoff and the French author Jacques Ferrand, in preparing the exhibition, but sadly all of them, except Wendt, died before its opening.
The book begins with a chapter on Carl XIV Johan. It is obviously based mostly on Fritz Corsing’s 1946 biography, but it is well written and Wendt offers some interesting perspectives on the founder of the Bernadotte dynasty.
After this we hear quite little about the Bernadottes and comparatively more about the Romanovs, as the author charts the life story of Lennart Bernadotte and some of his Russian relatives – his great-grandfather Aleksandr II, his maternal grandfather Grand Duke Pavel Aleksandrovich, his mother Maria Pavlovna and his uncle Grand Duke Dimitry Pavlovich, as well as Grand Duke Pavel’s three children from his second, morganatic marriage. One of them, Princess Irina Paley, was the mother of Prince Michel Romanoff, a first cousin who came to be a close friend of Lennart Bernadotte.
What many of those persons had in common was that their lives turned out quite differently from what they had expected. Grand Duke Pavel was banished from Russia because of his morganatic marriage, but was allowed to return at the outbreak of World War I, only to be executed by the Bolsheviks because of “the sins of his family” in 1919. Grand Duke Dimitry escaped this fate by having been banished from St Petersburg because of his involvement in the murder of Rasputin.
Lennart Bernadotte himself was thrown out of the royal family and had to make his own living by the use of his many talents. And his mother, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, refused to live in a loveless marriage with Prince Wilhelm and became one of the Russian royals who best succeeded in creating a new existence for herself following the revolution. It must however be said that Gunna Wendt puts somewhat too much faith in Maria Pavlovna’s memoirs, particularly when it comes to her version of her marriage and divorce.
The Bernadottes have produced more interesting and talented characters than most royal dynasties, yet they remain in the shadow of Lennart Bernadotte’s closest Russian relatives throughout this book. The relations between the two dynasties would also be worth a study, but is mostly bypassed by Wendt.
All in all this is an easily read and mostly correct book, but some significant voids make it less interesting than it might have been.

What to see: Yelagin Palace, St Petersburg

One of the nicest but least known of the former imperial palaces of Russia is the Yelagin Palace, which is situated on the Yelagin Island on the northern outskirts of St Petersburg – its empire style interiors and its location on the outskirts of the (former) capital makes it somewhat reminiscent of the French Malmaison or the Swedish Rosendal.
In the late 18th century the island belonged to Ivan Perfilevich Yelagin, one of Empress Ekaterina II’s courtiers, who had a house built on the eastern tip of the island. In 1817 the house and the island were bought by Emperor Aleksandr I, who gave the architect Carlo Rossi (1775-1849) the task of transforming the house as a present to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna. This was the first important commission in St Petersburg given to the man who would become one of the most important neoclassical architects in Russia and thereby put his distinct mark on the then capital.
The house new palace was built between 1818 and 1822. However, the Dowager Empress herself did apparently not show much interest in her new island and palace – she did after all live in considerable splendour at the wonderful palace at Pavlovsk. She later ceded the Yelagin Palace and island to her third son, who made it his official summer residence when he became Emperor Nikolaj I.
It remained an imperial residence until the revolution in 1917. In 1942 it was badly damaged by German shelling. Although it opened as a museum in 1987, it is only during this decade that the interiors have been restored to their former splendour. The central room is the Oval Hall, seen in the third and fourth photo, which is flanked by a blue and a red drawing-room (picture 5 and 6, respectively). Other important interiors are those of the dining room (in the seventh photo) and a drawing-room decorated in the Pompeian manner (last picture) – the latter is somewhat reminiscent of the Hall of Columns in the Mikhailovsky Palace, another important Rossi work.

Memorial mass for imperial family

Friday this week will be the 91st anniversary of the execution of the Russian ex-Emperor Nikolaj II, his consort Aleksandra Fyodorovna and their five children as well as the three employees who were with them to the end. Yesterday a memorial mass was held for them in the Cathedral of Saints Pyotr and Pavel in St Petersburg, where they were also laid to rest in 1998.
Present at the mass were, among others, the new patriarch of the Russian-Orthodox Church, Kirill I, St Petersburg’s governor, Valentina Matviyenko, and, representing the family, Olga Kulikovsky-Romanoff, widowed daughter-in-law of Grand Duchess Olga Aleksandrevna, Nikolaj II’s youngest sister.

Book news: Romanov jewels

On 30 June NMSE Publishing Ltd will release the book Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs: Saving the Royal Jewels. According to the publisher the book tells the story of how Albert Henry Stopford, "Edwardian man-about-town, member of the English aristocracy, dealer in object d'arts, and a regular guest at Romanov dinner tables" saved imperial jewels from the Vladimir Palace and brought them to Britain.
Some information from the website of the National Museums of Scotland:

http://shop.nms.ac.uk/products/Hidden-Treasures-of-the-Romanovs:-Saving-the-Royal-Jewels.html

New books: Biographies of Russian rulers

Yet another biography of the Empress Ekaterina II (called “the Great”) of Russia was published in Britain last month. Simon Dixon, who is professor of Russian history at University College London, is the author of Catherine the Great, which is published by Profile Books. The book focuses more on court culture, art and philosophy than on politics (the coup which brought Ekaterina II to power and ended in the murder of her husband is for example dealt with only briefly and in passing) and I was left with the impression that the author generally stays on the surface and rarely delves more deeply into things.

http://www.profilebooks.com/title.php?titleissue_id=565

Another of the Romanov dynasty’s most remarkable rulers, Pyotr I, was also the subject of a British biography published last month. Peter the Great is written by Derek Wilson and published by Hutchinson.

Exhibition on Alexander I in Turku

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Peace of Fredrikshamn in 1809 when Sweden lost Finland to Russia following the disastrous war of 1808-1809. To mark the anniversary the Castle in Finland’s former capital Turku (Åbo in Swedish) has an exhibition on Emperor Alexander I of Russia, who became Grand Duke of Finland in 1809.

The exhibition is called “Aleksanteri I – Hurmuri ja hallitsija” (“Alexander I – Charmör och kejsare” in Swedish) and lasts until 4 October this year. To accompany the exhibition there is a catalogue edited by Marita Söderström with texts in Finnish, Swedish and Russian.
The pictures show Turku Castle and a detail of one of many replicas of François Gérard’s portrait of Alexander I. This copy used to hang in the Supreme Court in Helsinki and is now in the National Museum of Finland.

(The National Museum of Finland’s grand exhibition on the events of 1809 closed last Sunday, but will open at the Royal Armoury in Stockholm in June.)

Some information on Turku Castle's website:

http://www.turku.fi/Public/default.aspx?contentid=82295