Twenty-two samples for the Catherine Palace

An order dated 8 July 1781 concerning the Catherine Palace contains an instruction easily overlooked amid the velvet and stucco: no fireplace was to be built in the dining room. It also directed that the windows of the building under construction be left open over winter to let the damp escape. The order listed the future rooms and their decoration, but first the walls had to be dried out. This detail reveals the palace before its state rooms took shape: not yet ready to live in, but already demanding precise decisions.

The Catherine Palace in Lefortovo was built on the site of the former Summer Annenhof. Construction of the masonry building began in 1773, but by 1776 the bricks had proved defective: the walls were beginning to crumble. A commission of architects decided to dismantle the masonry already erected and begin construction afresh. Before fabrics and mirrors could be chosen, they had to establish what materials could actually be used to build the palace.

Construction of a new building began in 1779; work continued until 1796. Several architects were involved in its design. In 1781 the building was still under construction, and the order was addressed to those who would have to make it fit for use. A room did not have to be finished for decisions to be made about its appearance. The position of a chimney, the condition of the masonry and the sequence of decorative work could not wait until construction was complete.

An Order for an Unfinished Palace

On 8 July 1781, Mikhail Izmailov sent an order to Prince Ivan Tyufyakin, head of the Moscow Court Intendant's Office. It conveyed Catherine II's instructions, given orally during his stay in St Petersburg. Between the spoken instructions and their execution stood a written order; between St Petersburg and Moscow, a palace still under construction. The list drawn up for those on site was surprisingly detailed.

First came the restrictions. No masonry niches were to be made in the empress's rooms on the state floor. Fireplaces had to be installed with care: flues were to be kept separate from timber, and no fireplace at all was planned for the dining room. This is no description of finished halls. The document captures a moment when they could still be altered, when their decoration depended on how a flue would be routed and where a space would be left empty.

Another instruction concerned damp. The walls were to be patched only after they had frozen through and dried out; hot coals could be used for thick sections that dried poorly. The windows of the unfinished palace were to remain open in winter so that the air could carry away moisture, and any snow that entered was to be removed immediately. There is no courtly ceremony here. There is a cold building and an effort to avoid spoiling its future decoration.

In the same vein came the decision to leave the exterior of the main building unrendered for the time being, even once construction was complete: a separate command would be required. Soil excavated for the foundations of service buildings was to be used in the side ditches. The order brings together the surfaces guests would see and the unseen work involving moisture, soil and masonry. This was how the residence existed even before construction was complete.

How Much Fabric for One Room?

Yet fabric becomes the central subject of the order. Tyufyakin was to calculate how much wall covering each room would need. Velvet was intended for one audience chamber, damask for the other rooms; some rooms were to have a plaster finish. The empress named Ivan Lazarev's factory. Here, the term ‘wall coverings’ refers to woven fabrics, rather than the familiar rolls of paper.

The instructions on materials were linked to the allocation of rooms. Dining rooms and entrance halls in the apartments of Catherine and members of the imperial family were to have a plaster finish, while other rooms were to be hung with fabric. The order gives neither wall lengths nor a final plan for each hall. What it does reveal is how a room's purpose shaped the choice of finish: where receptions would be held, where people would dine, where they would enter from outside. Different functions called for different decoration.

The hall and gallery were to be decorated with stucco, following drawings submitted to the empress for approval, but without statues. A separate drawing was required for the iconostasis of the palace church: it was not to extend all the way to the top, and the design had to be resubmitted for approval. These instructions set limits. Approval of an idea did not yet authorise every detail. Even after the overall form had been chosen, boundaries remained that the builder could not determine alone.

The order even addressed the view from the window: a way had to be found to hide the filth in the yard from anyone looking out of the gallery. Next came an instruction to source mirrors and window glass from Russian factories, if any suitable examples could be found. That condition matters. It does not tell us that all the mirrors were actually made in Russia; it records a preference while allowing that supply might prove harder than wishful thinking. The order distinguishes intention from a finished room.

Twenty-Two Samples

Two years later, the subject of fabrics returns in a letter from Catherine to Izmailov. On 7 July 1783, she instructed him to accept Ivan Lazarev's wall coverings when they arrived and pay for them according to the enclosed invoice, using funds allocated to the palace's construction. The letter refers to twenty-two samples she had previously approved. This marks a further step: from calculating quantities room by room to a specific order and arrangements for payment. The letter alone, however, does not prove that the walls had already been hung.

The historian Anna Kononova, who published the order, also cited archival records concerning the production of fabrics at Lazarev's Fryanovo manufactory in 1783–1784. The order itself describes the factory as being in Moscow; the researcher links it to the enterprise in Fryanovo, outside Moscow. The commission brings two places together: the palace on the Yauza and the workshops beyond the city. They are connected by an invoice, samples and production schedules.

The register of these twenty-two samples reads almost like a series of brief visual notes. In one version, birds appear among hanging landscape motifs against a blue ground. In another, ears of grain and partridges repeat against blue or crimson. There are bouquets on crimson satin, white satin with multicoloured bouquets, and birds and flowers amid green and white on crimson. The register carefully distinguishes between them: a single colour changes the entire design.

Among the descriptions is a yellow damask with landscape motifs featuring a gardener with a basket of flowers. This gardener does not step out of the fabric to become a participant in an event at the palace. He is part of a pattern recorded in the register. The researcher did not find the approved samples themselves; only descriptions of their features remain. We can therefore identify the colours and subjects, but not the precise patterns, the scale of the birds or the work of individual weavers.

This loss matters to the history of the palace. The stone colonnade can still be examined, but the fabric for which rooms were counted in the order has to be pieced together from words. The familiar façade tells us nothing about what the audience chamber looked like in the late eighteenth century. The interiors of the Catherine Palace later changed as the building took on new uses; the document, however, preserved the choices made before those changes. Not the complete result, but the sequence of decisions itself.

After the Patroness

After Catherine II's death, the palace acquired a new purpose. Under Paul I, the building and its service quarters were turned over for use as barracks. Eight battalions of the 2nd Moscow Garrison Regiment occupied the spaces for which velvet, damask and stucco decoration had once been chosen. The documents describe two periods in the life of a single building. The fabrics were ordered for an imperial residence; later, it was given another role.

The palace was later converted for the Smolensk Cadet Corps to a design by Osip Bove and under his supervision. The present façade does not reveal what the rooms were like in the summer of 1781: several architects worked on the building, which was subsequently adapted to a new purpose. Izmailov's order dates from the construction phase, when the future rooms could still be discussed in the imperative mood. Stone and fabric followed different rhythms.

That is why, on a tour of Lefortovo, outside the Catherine Palace it is worth letting your gaze linger on more than the columns. The route includes the palace, but does not promise a view of its former rooms. Traces of them survive in the instruction about unfinished plasterwork, in the cautious stipulation concerning glass, and in the list of colours approved for the walls.

The letter about the fabrics still echoes the ordinary course of business: accept the fabrics on delivery and pay for them. But the precise patterns of the twenty-two samples have disappeared, and the finished room cannot be reconstructed from the register alone. What remains is the practical precision of the instructions: before the walls could be covered in silk, they had to be allowed to dry. This adds a very brief interval to the long history of the palace — the time between an approved sample and a wall that was still damp.

Sources

1. A. Yu. Kononova. ‘Catherine II’s Instructions for the Interior Decoration of Her Palace in Lefortovo’
2. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report on the Restoration of the Catherine Palace, 2019
3. State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report on 1/10 Gospitalnaya Square, 2021