posed in kaftans like Polish Sarmatian noblemen; portraits were restrained and
dignified, even iconographic, or surrounded by ornate baroque panegyrics. Peter
I returned from European trips in 1697–8 and 1717–18 with dozens of seascapes,
landscapes, and portraits of himself commissioned in Europe; throughout his reign
he imported European artists and trained a native-born cohort of engravers and
artists. By the end of Peter’s reign Russian masters in engraving and oils were
producing excellent work, including Andrei Matveev’s charming portrait (1729) of
a couple who might actually have been the painter and his wife.
Matveev’s painting is emblematic of the uses to which Russia’s noble elite put
painting. From mid-century onward, they commemorated their achievements and
their identities in portraiture. As country gentlemen, they engaged in useful and
pleasant pastimes—designing gardens, improving their estates, hunting—as in the
studiously casual portrait of Prince Alexander Kurakin by G. E. Nattier (1728),
with hunting dog and gun, or the pose of the industrialist and amateur botanist
Prokofii A. Demidov next toflourishing plants in Dmitrii Levitskii’s 1773 portrait
(Figure 21.1). Even in such portraits, noblemen in service to the tsars took pains to
underscore their political stature. Tsarist orders incongruously sit on the hunting
jacket of Prince A. B. Kurakin in Jean-Marc Nattier’s 1728 portrait, while Vladimir
Borovikovskii’s 1801 portrait of later Prince Alexander Kurakin (Figure 21.2)
resplendently evokes his service to Emperor Paul I (Paul’s bust and monogram
are on the pillar, Kurakin’s many orders and awards weigh down his chest and
robe). The Baltic German Count Karl Sievers (d. 1774) similarly proudly displayed
his tsarist orders and a brooch with portrait of Peter III in a portrait by Georg
Caspar von Prenner; Levitskii included the same attention to medals and insignia in
his 1790 portrait of General Otto Heinrich (Iosif) Igelström, a nobleman from a
distinguished Swedish family in Russian service. Women adorned themselves with
the Order of St. Catherine (Princess Dashkova wore a brooch with Catherine II’s
portrait in a 1784 portrait by Levitskii even though estranged from her former
patroness), or emulated late eighteenth-century sentimentalism posing as Russian
peasant girls. Whether Russian, Swedish, or German, the imperial nobility pre-
sented itself as loyal servants of the empire.
Educated nobles and intellectuals were exposed to Enlightenment thought in an
amalgam of French and German trends that began with a pursuit of order and
rational understanding of man and the material world and extended to the radical
free-thinking of late eighteenth-century Frenchphilosophes. Russians took what
worked for them, favoring German universities over French and favoring religion
over free-thinking. Aleksandr Sumarokov, for example, for all his similarity of
intellectual interests to his admired Voltaire, deployed his tragedies to assert the
agency and immanence of God in contrast to Voltaire’s deism. In a wide array of
genres—memoirs, history writing and literature, odes and panegyrics, satirical
verse, and very influentially in theater—men of less exalted education than Sumar-
okov developed a group identity based on honorable service, commitment to the
institution of autocracy, and loyalty to the ruler, European culture, and pride in
Russia. Cynthia Whittaker calls this“advice literature,”with the advice extending
to ruler and to each other. Since these writers were state servants, either officially
440 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801