Russia - Pavlovsk - Palace

Pavlovsk Palace is an 18th-century Russian Imperial residence built by the order of Catherine the Great for her son, Grand Duke Paul, in Pavlovsk, within Saint Petersburg. After his death, it became the home of his widow, Maria Feodorovna. The palace and the large English garden surrounding it are now a Russian state museum and public park.

Catherine the Great loaned her official architect, the Scotsman Charles Cameron, to design a palace on a hillside overlooking the Slavyanka River. Cameron used the Palladian style of architecture.

Maria Feodorovna insisted in having several rustic structures which recalled the palace where she grew up at Étupes, today in Alsace. The palace he designed had a cube-shaped central block three stories high with a low dome supported by sixty-four columns. On either side of the building were two single story colonnades of curved open winged galleries connected to service buildings one and a half stories high.

King Louis XVI presented them with four Gobelin tapestries, Marie Antoinette presented Maria Feodorovna with a sixty-piece toilet set of Sèvres porcelain, and they ordered more sets of porcelain and purchased statues, busts, paintings, furniture and paintings, all for Pavlovsk.

Paul and Maria Feodorovna continued to fill Pavlovsk with art objects: antique marbles, statues, busts, urns, and pottery purchased at Pompei, over two hundred pieces of furniture from Paris, ninety-six clocks from Europe. The Imperial Glass factory, made special chandeliers for each room.

The work of decorating the interior was taken-up by Vincenzo Brenna, from Florence. Brenna designed interiors which reflected Paul's taste for Roman classicism. He created the white and gold Halls of War and Peace, on either side of the Greek Hall by Cameron, which had a colonnade of green false marble columns, resembling a Greek temple. He made the Italian hall into a replica of a Roman temple, and he built the State Bedroom for Maria Feodorovna as an imitation of the state bedroom of the King of France, with a huge gilded bed, and cream silk wallpaper painted in tempura with colorful flowers, fruit, musical instruments and gardening tools.

In 1796 Paul became Emperor. He decided to enlarge Pavlovsk into a palace suitable for a royal residence, adding two new wings on either side of the main building, and a church attached to the south wing. Emperor Paul was murdered by members of his court in 1801, and Pavlovsk Palace became the residence of the Empress Maria Feodorovna. She turned the house into a memorial to her murdered husband, filled with his furniture and portraits, and made the house a showcase for finest 18th-century French furnishings, paintings, sculpture and porcelain. After a fire in 1803, most of the Palace had to be rebuilt.

Before Maria Feodorovna died on 24 October 1828, she left the house to her younger son, Michael, and specified that none of the furniture should be taken away.

At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, as the political situation deteriorated, the palace was left to the care of Alexander Polovotsoff, director of the Art Institute and the Museum of Applied Arts in St. Petersburg. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, Pavlovsk was officially confiscated and turned into a museum, open to the public.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the curators of Pavlovsk began to pack as many of art objects as possible, starting with the Sèvres porcelain toilet set. The paintings, chandeliers, crystal, porcelain, rare furniture, and works of ivory and amber were packed and sent first. The Roman and Greek antiquities were too heavy and delicate to move, so they were taken to the basements.

The Germans took over Pavlovsk Palace for two and a half years. On 24 January 1944, when the Soviet troops arrived, the palace had already been burning for three days.

The Soviet government decided to restore Pavlovsk and the other ruined palaces around Leningrad.

In 1950, parts of the park opened to the public. In 1955, the restoration of the facade of the Palace was completed, and restoration of the interiors began. The chief of the restoration, Feodor Oleinik, was insistent that all the restoration be faithful to the original work. In 1957, thirteen years after the Palace had been burned, the first seven rooms were opened to the public.

Pavlovsk Park was conceived by Cameron as a classic English landscape garden. Cameron laid out a triple alley of five straight rows of Linden trees, in a long axis from the courtyard of the Palace, leading to a small semi-circular place in the forest. This served as a parade ground for Emperor Pavel's Imperial guards.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk_Palace]

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