THE Empress is, of course, Catherine the Great, and architect Charles Cameron. Cameron's work in Russia has been known in the West for quite a long time. Catherine had agents everywhere, luring promising architects and other artists to come and work for her in and around St Petersburg. She even flirted, briefly, with Gandon, through her emissary Princess Dashkov, but he came to Dublin instead. It was at one time believed, on the strength of a misattributed portrait, that Cameron had been in Dublin, but not so. It seems that he had put it about that he had Jacobite sympathies; but this, too, seems to have been a smoke-screen.
By 1779 he was in Russia, in the reflected glory of being the supposed kinsman of Cameron of Lochiel. He was in fact the son of a London carpenter of Scottish extraction. He had studied under Isaac Ware, and, no one knows quite how, had managed to get to Rome and write a book about the baths of the Romans.
Palladian, as distinct from neoclassic, architecture, was already well established in Russia, at least in and near St Petersburg, in the hands of Russian as well as immigrant designers. Quarenghi, who arrived at the same time as Cameron, carried it on. But Cameron, with his archaeological experience and decorative flair, was just the man to minister to Catherine's taste for novelty. He was singled out for particular distinction, given sumptuous accommodation at Tsarskoe Seloe, and the privilege of working directly to the Empress herself.
He was an awkward customer, and not, perhaps, a very appealing character. He seems to have acquired, perhaps by infection, some of the dictatorial and arbitrary methods of his imperial employer. But he got things done; indeed he did. Virtually nothing in St Petersburg itself, but at Tsarskoe Seloe and at Pavlovsk both of which are twenty-odd miles from the capital, his output in less than ten years is enormous. The elaborate interiors which he did for Catherine in the old palace at Tsarskoe Seloe were destroyed by the Nazis but have nearly all been meticulously reinstated, while the Agate Pavilion and the Cameron Gallery, which survived, are again in their full splendour. Pavlovsk, which is nearby, was by contrast a "green field" site, developed from scratch by Cameron and the Empress's daughter-in-law Maria Fedorovna from 1782 onwards. Pavlovsk was thoroughly ruined during the war, but the foresight, devotion and superhuman efforts of a band of individuals have resulted in the almost complete reinstatement of the palace and the garden buildings.
In these two gardens, and elsewhere in Russia, the fashion for exotica - Turkish, Gothic, Egyptian, Chinese - spread rapidly during this period, not in Cameron's hands but in those of others such as Velten, Neyelov, Kazakov and Bazhenov. Mr Shvidovsky gives us a survey off this unfamiliar material.
When Catherine died in 1796 the mad Tsar Paul abruptly dismissed Cameron and evicted him from his privileged accommodation, so that he had a very thin- time of it for four years or so, though he was partly restored to favour just before the Tsar was murdered by his entourage in 1801. His last work at Pavlovsk was the beautiful Pavilion of the Graces; he died ten years later.
He had, however, brought over to Russia on his own initiative several building practitioners from Scotland, two of whom, Adam Menelaws and William Hastie, had interesting careers, to which Mr Shvidovsky devotes his last chapter. Menelaws, who did the extraordinary cast-iron Egyptian gateway at Tsarskoe Seloe, went on to build the palace at Baturin for Cyril Rasoumovsky and other palaces in the provinces for the same family. Hastie, who was both enterprising and versatile, though not much of an architect, to judge from the illustrations, has the credit for those charming cast-iron bridges over the Moika and other canals in St Petersburg, before becoming Russia's premier town-planner, with plans not only for Moscow (inevitably largely frustrated) but for many provincial cities, exercising powers which reflected the prevailing centralised autocracy of the empire.
This book is enriched with numerous fine illustrations from original sources, including spectacular watercolours by Cameron of the Agate Pavilion, both of which, of the exterior and of the interior, are reproduced twice. We are given the opportunity to compare them with modern photographs, also in colour. But the book is rather short on the provision of plans. The translation, by Catherine Cooke, does not read like a translation at all, than which there can be no higher praise.