Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

At first this concept had a rational element: it helped turn Russian artists into respected members of society by putting order into their rise up the state ladder. But naturally, there was a danger that soon manifested itself: dressed in impressive uniforms with gold braid and medals and orders, artists began to feel like officials, with diminishing creative results. Among these obedient and cautious bureaucrats with palettes and brushes, Briullov was like a “lawless comet” in the gray St. Petersburg sky.

Yes, Nicholas valued talent, but he valued order, discipline, and zeal even more. The emperor hated indolence, drunkenness, and negligence in Russian artists, according to reminiscences of contemporaries. To everyone’s horror, Briullov worked only when the mood struck him and periodically went on legendary drunken benders; even though he was a professor at the academy he somehow managed to never wear the uniform—not even on formal occasions—and his behavior should have outraged the emperor. But no. Something about the “great Karl” fascinated Nicholas, who forgave Briullov’s romantic peccadilloes that would have been unthinkable for anyone else.

Everyone in Russia tried to be in the tsar’s good graces, but not Briullov. In that sense, the artist was even more independent than Pushkin, who had also showed the tsar his lion’s claws from time to time.

Examples of Briullov’s affronts are numerous, each more colorful than the last. Nicholas visited his studio unexpectedly, and the artist refused to come out: he was not well, he claimed. Nicholas ordered a series of paintings depicting his Guards regiments on parade, but the artist replied that he did not know how to paint parades and would not do it. Briullov also rejected the tsar’s pet idea for a historical painting—Ivan the Terrible praying with his wife in a peasant hut during the taking of Kazan.

It got worse. Briullov did everything he could to avoid the most desirable commission possible—portraits of Nicholas and his family. In the summer of 1837, Nicholas invited the artist to his summer residence in Peterhof, where Briullov began a double portrait on horseback of the empress and her daughter. He painted sitting by the window in a garden pavilion, while the royal riders posed outside.

A downpour began. The court physician, worried about the empress’s frail health, tried to stop the session, but she refused: “Don’t bother him while he is working!” The empress and her daughter were soaked to the skin. On that occasion, Briullov played the role of enraptured genius to the hilt, but he never did complete the portrait.

Once, Briullov was summoned to the Winter Palace to paint another daughter of the tsar. Nicholas came in during the session and as usual made suggestions. The painter put down his brush. “I can’t continue, my hand is trembling with fear.” The contemporary who noted Briullov’s reply added, “Artists will understand the mockery, but I don’t know whether or not the emperor did.”¹⁹

Of course Nicholas did, but he pretended not to be offended. He wanted a portrait by Briullov as a necessary attribute of imperial majesty. But even his own portrait created a problem. The tsar informed Briullov that he would come to his studio to pose, and then was twenty minutes late. When he arrived, Nicholas was told by Briullov’s terrified apprentice that the artist “expected Your Majesty, but knowing that you are never late, thought that you had canceled the session.”

The perplexed Nicholas left Briullov’s studio, murmuring, “What an impatient man!”²⁰ Work on the portrait ended before it began.

Briullov positioned himself as a Romantic and, therefore, free figure. “It was easier for him to anger the Sovereign and bear his wrath than to paint his portrait,” a contemporary noted. But there was an area where the tastes and preferences of the artist and tsar coincided: erotic art.

Nicholas liked pictures of buxom, voluptuous women. Briullov was a specialist of that genre. His early work Italian Morning, depicting a beauty with bared breasts, ended up in the imperial family’s private collection. Nicholas was so pleased with it that he commissioned a painting in pendant, in the same spirit. So Italian Noon, slightly less erotic but no less tempting, came to be.

Nicholas thought himself a moral person. His treatment of his wife was markedly courtly. (She was his first woman.) But that did not keep him from enjoying his enormous collection of erotic drawings, which experts acquired for him all over Europe; he also had a good collection of medieval chastity belts.²¹

Briullov’s painting Bacchanalia, which had belonged to Nicholas, has survived. It was kept in a special frame with a lock and covered by a lithograph. When it was unlocked, Briullov’s painting appeared: a depiction of the Bacchae in a love scene with satyrs and an ass, a traditional erotic motif.