Eighteenth Century Dutch Tiles and their Twentieth Century Reconstruction in the Winter Palace of Peter the Great
Image: Tile with a sailing vessel on the waves and a spider’s head (“spin”) corner motif. Inv.no АСП-960. Photo by Roxana Rebrova. Source: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
The Winter Palace of Peter the Great today stands at the corner of the Palace Embankment and the Winter Canal embankment. When it was being built in 1716, the czar wanted to decorate the interiors with as many tiles as possible. Most likely to this end “twenty boxes of Dutch tiles” were commissioned and brought by the De Strafort ship from Amsterdam in 1716. Their description has survived in an archive file: 2 200 tiles were with pictures of ships, half of them in a large circle, and 4 700 tiles described in the inventory as “landshalle” or “landscape”, with 1 400 pieces of these singled out specifically as “with dianthus carnation flowers”. It was such tiles in pitifully small numbers and mostly in shards that we received as archaeological material after debris had been cleared in the course of the 1978 reconstruction of the Winter Palace of Peter the Great. The tiles ended up in the mid-18th-century construction debris after being “scraped off” the walls, when the dilapidated palace was adapted to the Guards’ needs in 1749. Field surveys made prior to the palace reconstruction project had shown that there were a total of five tiled rooms in Malye palatki (Peter’s private chambers) and one in the main building – the corner dining-room. There were up to 30 000 tiles in those rooms, which had been tiled by Russian masters Yakov Obreskov and Nikita Smirnov under the supervision of a specially invited Dutch master.
The tiles with ships in large circles mentioned in the ship’s load had evidently been custom made exclusively for the czar. The type of tiles with a sailing vessel on the waves and a spider’s head (“spin”) corner motif was rather rare and, as a rule, made for export. They were manufactured in Rotterdam between 1700 and 1725. Tiles with landscapes in large circles and the ox-head and dianthus corner motifs, plus a small number with manganese-coloured enamel, were also used in interior design.
After preliminary research and archaeological studies, the reconstruction of fragments of the last Winter Palace of Peter the Great structures identified in 1978 started in 1988. As a result, the Hermitage now has the restored north-west part of the palace, including the five private chambers of Peter the Great that were decorated with Dutch tiles in the period between 1716 and 1720.
Patterns for the tiles to be reconstructed were drawn from various sources, primarily from the tile décor of the Menshikov Palace, stencils used in Makkum tile manufacturing, authentic tiles from archaeological material, and bibliographical sources. The pigments and techniques were analogous to those used in Netherlands in the first half of the 18th century; pigments were made of raw materials used during that period.