Abstract
"Projecting Sovereignty across the Baltic Sea: Catherine II, Alexander Roslin and the Freighted Power of the State Portrait"
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In 1774, after developing his career for nearly three decades in Germany, Italy, and Paris, the Swedish artist Alexander Roslin returned to the Baltic region to work for Gustav III in Stockholm and then for Catherine II in St Petersburg. During his two years in Russia, Roslin painted state portraits of both rulers that may have been conceived as pendants to each other, as that of Gustav was destined for the king’s new portrait collection at Gripsholm Castle and was joined there by a copy of that of Catherine. Meanwhile, the empress had acquired portraits of Gustav and his relatives for a new gallery of her own that flaunted her ascendancy on the European stage. The intertwined history of these transactions speaks to a peculiarly competitive chapter in the development of state portraiture, and the panache with which Catherine mastered the agency of imagery and display. Testament to an avowedly visual flexing of imperial muscle, the commissions and gifts reveal the mobility with which portraits enabled the circulation of political as well as aesthetic sensibilities around the Baltic Sea, and the heft with which they mediated readings of status and hierarchy in the charged second decade of Catherine’s rule.
– Rosalind P. Blakesley, University of Cambridge
NB. This paper formed part of the project "Russia, Empire, and the Baltic Imagination" funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, to which the author extends sincere thanks.
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