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This room with two windows, two entrance doors and an alcove was created in the early 1770s and served as the bedroom of Grand Duchess Natalia Alexeyevna. Later Charles Cameron reconstructed it for Paul’s  second wife, Grand Duchess Maria Fiodorovna, and the interior that he created has survived down to the present with a few alterations made by the architect Vasily Stasov during repair work after the 1820 fire. In the Bedchamber Cameron used a favourite approach that he employed repeatedly for interiors at Tsarskoye Selo: he decorated the walls with relief co mpositions on motifs taken from Pompeian murals.

This interior, though, is made highly original by the slender columns of white faience entwined with golden garlands that are placed along the walls and in the depths of the room. The plaster medallions containing allegorical scenes representing health, happiness, prosperity and sufficiency are the work of Ivan Martos. The combination of the light green of the walls with the azure background of the medallions and the gilding forms an exquisite colour scheme for the Bedchamber. The fairly small doors are framed by gilded fillets and decorated by rectangular pa nels painted with arabesques and enclosed in the same sort of fillet.

Outstanding among the furnishings of the Bedchamber are a little steel table and the fire grille made by the smiths of Tula specially for Catherine II and also an exquisite marquetry dressing-table made in the 1770s for Maria Fiodorovna by members of the Naskov cabinet-making family in the Okhta suburb of St Petersburg. The room also contains part of a set of furniture made to order by the French craftsman Georges Jacob for Catherine II, and also a little glass table from the Empress’s Blue Study (known as the Snuffbox) in her private apartments on the south side of the Catherine Palace.

In summer of 1796, the future Emperor Nicholas I was born in this Bedchamber.

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