Tsarskoe Selo was honoured to take part in four remarkable exhibition projects in Moscow and St Petersburg earlier this year.

The Russian Military History Society’s exhibition venue in Moscow hosted the Emperor Alexander III exhibition, to which our Museum loaned lithographs from the tsar’s coronation album, showing his coronation celebrations in Moscow in May 1883, and some watercolours from the Alexander III’s Official Visit to the Caucasus series by artist Mihaly Zichy.

Two projects were put together by the State Hermitage. The Potyomkin Himself exhibition, celebrating the Russian prince’s 280th birth anniversary, was set out in the state rooms of the Winter Palace and included a marble bust of Grigory Potyomkin by sculptor Fedot Shubuin and Catherine II Giving the Law to Taurica, a large-scale canvas commissioned by the prince from German artist Andreas Huhne.

The other project, marking 275 years since the foundation of St Petersburg’s Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, was named In the Community of Arts and placed in the Armorial and Picket Halls of the Winter Palace. Among some true masterpieces from the collections of the State Hermitage, Russian Museum, Pavlovsk, Peterhof and Kuskovo Estate, Tsarskoe Selo showcased three very exquisite pieces: Apollo the Hunter, a nineteenth-century copy after Mikhail Kozlovsky; Lady with Rose, a figure of 1923 after Vasily Kuznetsov’s model; and a historical vase of the 1820s showing Alexander I meeting with Francis II of Austria and Frederick William III of Prussia outside Paris in March 1814.

The Empire and the Caucasus: Arms, Uniforms and Military Traditions of the 19th–early 20th century is the title of the third project, which took place at Moscow’s National Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art. Their display told about Russia in Caucasian and Transcaucasian wars of the nineteenth century and WWI and offered over 600 objects from more than 20 participants including state museums, archives and private collections. Tsarskoe Selo loaned paintings, imperial uniforms and Caucasian cold weapons numbering over 30 objects, including a lithograph of 1858 after Carl Piratsky’s drawing Other Ranks of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Convoy, whose reproduction graced the exhibition catalog as a signature item.