18th Century Furniture - Russia

Catherine the Great became empress of Russia in 1762 and ruled until 1796. Her reign marked a golden age of Russian culture, during which St. Petersburg, built in the first half of the 18th century, became a prominent European capital.
Catherine's predecessor, Empress Elizabeth I, had commissioned architects to build magnificent Rococo palaces and pavilions, but Catherine promoted the Neoclassical style, both in architecture and furnishings of fitted and non fitted furniture. During her reign she commissioned the building of the two Hermitages next to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Both were built in the austere Neoclassical style, with colonnaded facades, the first as a pavilion where Catherine could relax and the second to house the Empress's library and growing art collection. Following Catherine's example, the aristocracy built imposing new mansions in St. Petersburg and grand homes on large country estates.

Neoclassical Style
Handmade furniture styles became more severe, but lighter. Russian Neoclassical furniture is rectilinear and decorated primarily with symmetrical motifs and geometric patterns, but it is larger in scale and often more brightly decorated than similar styles elsewhere in Europe.
Commodes, tables, and chairs were influenced by French examples and were often made of mahogany with gilt, bronze, or brass mounts. Elaborate tables were designed to be placed in the centre of a room, rather than against a wall, and were therefore decorated on all sides. Elegant brass-enriched dining chairs were fashionable in the 1790s and could be found in most of the palaces and in the collections of the Russian elite. Some had trellis-pattern backs with mounts attached to the joins of the pattern, and legs inlaid with reeded brass.

Innovative Designs
Mechanical furniture was popular in Russia. The inventive German cabinet-maker, David Roentgen, visited St. Petersburg five times between 1783 and 1789, and supplied many intriguing pieces of furniture to Catherine the Great, including desks at which she could write either standing up or sitting down, cabinets in which she could display her medals and gems, and a revolving armchair. The pieces that Roentgen produced for his Russian clients were more elaborate and ostentatious than those that he produced for his French and German patrons, and were made from woods that resembled the native Russian Karelian birch.

Decorative Features
Private factories and estate workshops were set up in St. Petersburg and around Russia, to create furnishings for the new palaces and mansions. Russian craftsmen became highly skilled, skill required today with the reproduction furniture techniques, and created fine pieces of furniture decorated with marquetry and gilding, influenced by both French and German designs. The Classical motifs of sphinxes. griffins, dolphins, lions' heads, acanthus, rosettes, and swags were very common, and fine brass inlays were used to imitate Classical columns.
Table cabinets were decorated with exotic inlays of ivory and bone, and porcelain plaques from the Wedgwood factory in England were set into furniture panels.

Traditional Styles
Vernacular furniture remained traditional and was usually made of oak. Armchairs based on monastic furniture, benches, and tables, sometimes with extending leaves, were simple and differed little from the pieces in peasant homes.