Alexander I by S.Shchukin (1806, priv.coll)

STEPAN SEMIONOVICH SHCHUKIN, 1758-1828
signed in Latin m.l. and dated 1806
oil on canvas
PROVENANCE
Acquired in 1807 for the first Earl of Malmesbury by his secretary James Tyrrell Ross White while employed in Lord Granville's Embassy at St. Petersburg
Private English Collection, since 1987
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
Antoine Cheneviere, Russian Furniture, The Golden Age, 1780-1840, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988, ill. p.177
CATALOGUE NOTE
This grand yet intimate cabinet portrait depicts Emperor Alexander I standing at ease in full army uniform of the Imperial Preobrazhensky Regiment. In the background is Kammenostrovsky Island Palace, built for the Tsar while he was still a boy, to be his future St. Petersburg residence. His pose directly recalls the famous portrait of his father, Emperor Paul I, painted ten years previously by Shchukin (see fig. 1). The offered lot is said to be one of several similar versions, one being in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, and another in the Queen’s collection, England.
Stepan Shchukin was an orphan who learned to draw while living in a hospice for homeless children in Moscow in the mid 1760s. Despite these humble beginnings, a combination of talent and effort earned him a place at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he studied portraiture under Dmitri Levitsky. There he won a scholarship to continue his studies in Paris from 1782-6 where he received further instruction from the court painter Alexander Roslin. He returned to Russia in 1786 and within two years took over from his former tutor as head of the portraiture department at the Academy. In 1797 he became a full member for his portrait of Paul I (fig 1). From 1804-1812 he worked together with his contemporary Borovikovsky on the interior decoration of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He is considered to be, after Levitsky and Borovikovsky one of the best portraitists in Russia of his time and fostered a new generation in his wake, including Vasili Tropinin and Orest Kiprensky.
Kamennostrovsky Palace was designed by the architect Georg Friedrich Velten (1730-1801), one among many foreign architects who were summoned to the capital by Catherine the Great in the 18th century (see fig.2). Velten had re-designed the interiors of the Peterhof Palace for Catherine the Great in the 1770s and, with the conclusion of Russo-Turkish war in 1774, he was commissioned to build a palace commemorating the Russian naval victory over the Turks at Chesme Bay in 1770.

The offered painting belonged to the distinguished English diplomatist Sir James Harris, the first Earl of Malmesbury. It was his period of service in Russia that established him as a diplomat of the highest distinction, after he successfully navigated the diplomatic storms of the Northern Accord, a costly campaign aggressively pursued in particular by one of Catherine the Great’s advisors, Count Nikita Panin, whose career was eventually brought down as a consequence. Emperor Alexander I visited Sir James Harris at his residence in Henley during a trip to England in 1814.