Interiors of the Stieglitz Mansion, by Luigi Premazzi, 1869-71

The Main Staircase.

Detail of above.

Baron Alexander von Stieglitz (1 September 1814, St. Petersburg - 24 October 1884, St. Petersburg), Russian financier and philanthropist. Born the only son of Ludwig von Stieglitz - a Jewish German-born banker who immigrated to Russia and converted to Christianity, and who became court banker to Alexander I and was made a baron - he took over his father's banking business at the latter's death in 1843. He became Russia's leading financier, the first governor of the Bank of Russia and, in addition to contributing to many other charities and institutions, was founder of the Central College of Technical Drawing (now the A. L. Stieglitz St. Petersburg State Industrial Art Academy).

The Main Staircase - second view.

Detail of above.

His Renaissance Revival mansion on the English Embankment in St. Petersburg was constructed on the site of two older buildings - and at the enormous cost of 3.5 million rubles - from 1859 to 1862, to the designs of architect Alexander Krakau. After the death of Stieglitz in 1884, the mansion was inherited by his adopted daughter, and then purchased by the State Treasury in 1887 as the intended residence of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich shortly before his marriage to Grand Duchess Alexandra Georgievna, daughter of King George I of Greece. (The building is sometimes referred to as the palace of Grand Duke Paul.) After the death of his twenty-year-old wife during the birth of their second child in 1891, the Grand Duke did not return to live in the building. For a long time afterward it stood vacant. Eventually it became home to various Soviet institutions, and was recently acquired by St. Petersburg State University. The university’s planned restoration is expected to cost fifty to sixty million dollars.

The Ballroom.

Detail of above.

Study of Baroness Stieglitz.

The White Drawing Room.

Detail of above.

The Dining Room.

The Concert Hall.

Detail of above.

The Drawing Room.

The Main Study.

Detail of above. (I love that there's a billiard table in the alcove.)

The Blue Drawing Room.

The Library.

Detail of above. (The object on the stand is a model of the celebrated Millenium of Russia monument, erected in Novgorod in 1862.)

The Dining Room.

The Supper Room.

Detail of above.

Recent pictures of the Stieglitz Mansion.

The Concert Hall (2).

The Ballroom.

The Drawing Room (2).

The White Drawing Room.

***

Luigi Ossipovich Premazzi (1814, Milan - 1891, Istanbul), Italian painter, long resident in Russia, best known for his beautifully precise and atmospheric watercolors of grand, densely decorated interiors. He attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and then the private school run by Giovanni Migliara. Having moved to Russia in 1839 (or circa 1850, depending on the source), from 1851 he was a much-commissioned chronicler of the lavish palace interiors of Russia's aristocratic and Imperial families, and he became a teacher at St. Petersburg's Imperial School of Fine Arts in 1861.