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In the morning, we will a
CHAPTER SEVEN
CATHERINE THE GREAT’S LOST ART
Reynoud Lorentz and his ship Vrouw Maria were in serious trouble. The ship was stuck fast on a rock, and from where Lorentz stood near the stern, he could hear water pouring into the hold. Everywhere he looked, he saw more rocks surrounding the ship like giant teeth waiting to devour her. Vrouw Maria was already badly damaged, and the violent surf threatened to overwhelm the efforts of the crew, who strained at the pumps to try to keep the flooding down. Panicked, the men shouted up at Lorentz, demanding that he give the order to abandon ship. Better to save their own lives than the cargo, they argued. Lorentz did not want to leave his cargo behind, particularly not this cargo. The narrow stack of crates in the hold, loaded quietly on the dock in Amsterdam, was far too precious. But, in the end, he conceded that it was time to go.
The voyage that was now foundering along with Vrouw Maria had begun on August 12, 1771, as workers began to load her with cargo for St. Petersburg. On September 5, as a strong southwest wind filled the sails, Vrouw Maria raised anchor and headed out to sea, “in the name of God,” as Lorentz wrote in the logbook. Heavy winds and stormy weather battered the tiny ship as she made her way up the North Sea, passing Jutland in a driving rainstorm. Finally, on the morning of September 23, Vrouw Maria anchored off the Danish port of Elsinore, where all ships ru
The records of the custom house list Vrouw Maria’s cargo as sugar, “Brazil wood,” cotton, cambric, calico, linen, zinc, cheese, paper, indigo, mercury, butter and other items — a nondescript array that would hopefully fetch a good price in the Russian winter capital. No mention was made of the ship’s “special cargo,” a shipment for the Russian Imperial Court. Its presence on Vrouw Maria may have been a secret, or, as Fi
Heading up the Baltic towards the Gulf of Finland, Vrouw Maria sailed into a storm on the September 30. For the next three days, the ship beat through heavy seas and rain. Lorentz did not realize that Vrouw Maria, drifting in the storm, was off course. Then, on the evening of October 3, the ship hit a submerged rock. The collision brought Vrouw Maria to a sudden stop, and Lorentz wrote in the ship’s log that “at first we thought that we would sink when a high wave lifted us.” As she drifted along, the ship hit another rock: “We struck hard and lost our rudder and part of the stern.” Leaking badly, Vrouw Maria drifted off again, and the crew anchored her. Every man took a turn at the pumps to try and get rid of the water that was rapidly filling the ship. They pumped all night, but by the early morning, the storm was still blowing and the crew was exhausted. “Since we could not continue pumping and save the ship and its cargo,” said Lorentz, he gave order to abandon ship.
Crowded into a small dinghy, the crew rowed over to a small island, not much bigger than a rock, and spent a cold night. When help arrived the next morning, Lorentz and his men learned that they were stranded off the southern coast of Finland in the Turko Archipelago, a maze of twenty thousand islets, islands and rocks. The ship, surprisingly, was still afloat, though there was little chance of saving her as the decks were close to the water. But some of the cargo might be saved, so Lorentz ordered the crew back to Vrouw Maria. For the next three days, they worked the pumps to keep the rising water in the hold from swamping the ship. The sugar cargo was certainly ruined; when Lorentz tasted the water pouring out of the pumps as the men labored, it was sweet. His dismay deepened when each stroke of the pumps brought up gouts of coffee beans. The crates, bundles, bags and boxes in the flooded hold were banging and bumping around, and breaking up.
Lorentz’s luck held long enough for the crew to open the hatches and start pulling out the top layer of cargo. Taking their knives in hand, the sailors also cut down Vrouw Maria’s sails and some of her rigging, salvaging everything they could before the ship slipped into the deep. Finally, on October 9, as they rowed to the ship after spending the night ashore, they found the sea was empty. In the night, alone in the darkness, Vrouw Maria had finally sunk. There was no trace of the ship, not a scrap of floating debris, to mark her passing.
Count Nikita Panin, Russia’s foreign minister, sat at his desk, signing a confidential letter to the Swedish government. His letter asked the Swedes, who controlled the Turko Archipelago, to assist the Russians in an “unusual” matter. Vrouw Maria’s secret shipment had included not only silver, snuffboxes and art for members of the Imperial Court but also, Panin explained, “several crates with valuable paintings belonging to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.”
Empress Catherine the Great was in the midst of assembling one of Europe’s greatest collections of art and treasure for her small Hermitage (or retreat) in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. She had married Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to Russia’s throne, when she was sixteen. But Catherine soon grew disaffected with her husband, who was said to be weak-minded, indecisive and not conjugally interested in his passionate Prussian princess. After Peter was crowned tsar in 1761, his unpopularity grew. Catherine plotted with a group of nobles and army officers led by her lover, Count Grigory Orlov, to depose the tsar. When their coup toppled Peter from his throne in 1762, Catherine seized power. Her reign was a time of sweeping change in Russia. The empress, like her predecessor Peter the Great, was interested in modernizing and westernizing the nation, which was still a feudal state. Among her accomplishments was the introduction of smallpox vaccine to Russia in 1768. Under Catherine, the Russian court became a center for European culture. The empress invited prominent intellectuals to St. Petersburg, encouraged public building projects, and was a patron of the arts and literature both in Russia and abroad. An admirer of the French philosopher Voltaire, Catherine regularly corresponded with him. When Voltaire died in 1778, Catherine purchased his entire seven-thousand volume library and had it shipped to St. Petersburg.
In her lifetime, Catherine the Great amassed collections so diverse and magnificent that she had to build an addition to her Winter Palace to house the paintings, sculptures, porcelain, antiquities, exquisite furnishings and silver. The secret cargo of Vrouw Maria had come from one of the most famous art collections of its day, making the loss all the more painful.
When wealthy Dutch shipping merchant Gerrit Braamcamps died in Amsterdam on June 17, 1771, he left behind a home filled with that his contemporaries called a “treasure cabinet” of more than three hundred paintings, porcelain, silver and other valuables. But the heirs of Braamcamps wanted cash, not the collection, so they sold it at auction. Catherine ordered Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Prince Galitsyn, to “look after her interests” at the sale. On her behalf, he acquired a number of European Old Masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens.