Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (47 page)
Read Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman Online
Authors: Robert K. Massie
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography, #Politics
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Throughout the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) that followed, Russia and England were never at war, despite each being allied with the enemies of the other.
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For centuries, elevation to the Polish throne had been by election, with most of the Polish nobility preferring to submit to the weak rule of a foreign king than to sacrifice any of their own privileges by giving preference to one of their own blood. The result was permanent near anarchy.
The imperial coronation crown designed for Catherine. The crown was used in all six of the Romanov coronations that followed.
(RIA Novosti)
Prince Christian Augustus of Anhalt-Zerbst, father of Princess Sophia, who would become Catherine the Great
Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, Sophia’s mother
Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, who brought Sophia to Russia at fourteen and changed her name to Catherine. The empress then married the adolescent girl to her nephew, Peter, and charged her with immediately producing an infant to secure the dynasty.
(Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum; photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets)
Catherine at sixteen, at the Russian court
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Portrait of Grand Duchess Ekatrina Alekseyevna, later Catherine II
, c. 1745 by Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49), Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Catherine and her new husband, who would become Emperor Peter III
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Portrait of Catherine the Great
(
1729–96
)
and Prince Petr Fedorovich (1728–62)
, 1740–45 (oil on canvas) by Georg Christoph Grooth (1716–49), © Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Ukraine/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Portrait of Peter III
Stanislaus Poniatowski, Catherine’s second lover and later king of Poland, an office forced on him by Catherine
(
Stanislaus II Augustus, King of Poland
, c. 1790? by Marcello Bacciarelli, oil on canvas, © by permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Sergei Saltykov, Catherine’s first lover and the possible father of her son Paul. Catherine described Saltykov in her memoirs as “handsome as the dawn,” an opinion not wholly confirmed by this portait.
Gregory Potemkin, covered with medals, titles, land, palaces, and responsibilities by a passionately loving Catherine
(Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum; photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets)
Gregory Orlov, Catherine’s third lover, who was with her for eleven years and helped to put her on the throne
