And when they had gone - Autochromes of the Alexander Palace, by Andrei Zeest, 1917.

The Palisander Drawing Room.

The Alexander (Alexandrovsky) Palace - generally considered the favorite home of the last Imperial family of Russia, and where they spent the first five months of their captivity after the start of the Revolution - was commissioned by Catherine the Great for her favorite grandson, the future Alexander I, on the occasion of his marriage. It was built to the design of Giacomo Quarenghi and constructed between 1792 and 1796. After his accession in 1801, Alexander chose to reside in the nearby - and larger - Catherine Palace and gave the Alexander Palace to his brother, the future Nicholas I, for summer usage. From that time it was the summer residence of the heir to the throne; even after coming to the throne, Nicholas I was very attached to the building, though his successors less so. Several members of the family would die while in residence, and the future Nicholas II was born there in 1868.

Another view of the Palisander Drawing Room.

The Imperial bedroom.

Another view of the Imperial bedroom.

It was Nicholas and his wife, the Empress Alexandra, who would make the biggest impact on the palace, and the home life they established there has become an enduring part of their legend. With a growing, close-knit family, the Empress devoted much energy to the redecoration of the private rooms. Designed in a mix of late Victorian, Art Nouveau, and an Edwardian neoclassicism, the rooms were always filled with flowers, the tables and shelves laden with art objects and framed photographs. Though the renovations would be much criticized by the Empress' detractors for being middle class and insufficiently "Imperial", the rooms as they were then had a feminine charm and, most importantly for her and her family, were pretty, cozy, and practical.

The Mauve Study, aka "the Mauve Boudoir", "the Lilac Study".

Another view of the Mauve Study. Although these rooms still seem quite full by modern standards, many items have already been removed.

The Maple Drawing Room.

Another view of the Maple Drawing Room. The plants have yet to be removed from the room.

Soon after the Imperial family was transported to Siberia in August of 1917 the palace was turned into a museum; it continued as such until the beginning of the Second World War. Tsarskoe Selo was occupied during the war, and the palace was used as headquarters for the German military command. In the German's retreat, when so many other Imperial residences were burned - including the adjacent Catherine Palace - the Alexander Palace, though looted and heavily damaged, was spared destruction. The real destruction came after the war, when most of the historic interiors vanished, the rooms altered to make up plain exhibition halls for a proposed museum to Pushkin. When that plan came to nothing, the building was turned over to the use of the Soviet Navy. At the end of the twentieth century, with Perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Empire, and an increasing interest in Russia's last Imperial family, the Navy was finally induced to vacate. A museum dedicated to the family was soon instituted and important restoration work began immediately - the structure was in a precarious state - and continues to this day. In 2015 the museum was closed to the public for a major renovation, a multi-year project to include, among other things, the recreation of the private rooms of the Nicholas and Alexandra.

The Empress' Formal Reception Room.
The large portrait at center is a tapestry copy of Vigée Lebrun's celebrated group of Marie Antoinette and her children, a gift
from the French government. Rather an unfortunate choice, considering the similarly unpleasant fate of the two women....

The Small Library/Dining Room. (I believe this image has been reversed.)

The Portrait Hall.

The Marble/Billiard Hall.

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A series of Autochromes, 140 in total, were made in 1917 by the military photographer Andrei Zeest, who had been commissioned by the art historian George Loukomski, Head of the Tsarskoe Selo Inventory Commission. The views of the Catherine Palace were taken in June-July of 1917, and the Alexander Palace interiors were photographed in August-September, soon after the Tsar's family was sent into exile. Now that a comprehensive restoration of the palace is under way, the detail-rich Autochromes have become one of the most important resources for the museum workers, restorers, and historians. The larger number of the Autochrome plates were taken out of Russia when Loukomski emigrated in 1918. About 40 Autochromes featuring the palaces were added to the Tsarskoe Selo collection in the 1960s, received from Andrei Zeest's widow.

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Click to expand.

The Alexander Palace in 1840.

The Rose Pavilion "Ozerki" at Peterhof - three watercolors by Luigi Premazzi, 1850

The Rose or "Ozerki" (lakes) Pavilion in the Lugovoi (meadow) Park at Peterhof was designed by Andrei Ivanovich Stakenschneider and constructed in 1845-1848, specifically for the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, one of several lakeside follies at Peterhof that the architect created for the pleasure of Tsar Nicholas I and his family. While several of the other pavilions destroyed by the Germans during World War II have been restored/reconstructed, this one has not.

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Most if not all of these photographs are dated circa 1890-1910.

A hand colored photograph.

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The ruins of the pavilion today.

Kissing the Imperial hand - the Kremlin, April 10th, 1900.

An assembly of noble ladies in the St. Andrew's Hall (throne room) of the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. They are participating in a reception known as the baise-main (hand-kissing). Every first of January the Empress would hold such a reception at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, where noble ladies, officials, and other privileged individuals would file past, be presented to the Empress and kiss her hand. In 1900 the "Young Empress", Alexandra Feodorovna, was in Moscow for Easter, and the ladies of Moscow were given the opportunity to do homage to the Emperor's wife.

Detail of above.

Detail of above.

Detail of above. Ladies-in-waiting of the Empress along with three court chamberlains. 

The formidable looking lady second from right is Princess Marie Golitsyn, the Empress' Mistress of the Robes.

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(Edit: A big thank you to fellow blogger, Joanna Wrangham, who has since posted the same images and others taken during the Easter sojourn of 1900. Though I had found them labeled as being taken during the coronation ceremonies in 1896 she, using extracts from the Emperor's diaries, has given us the correct date of these photographs. Thank you, Ms. Wrangham!)

From my collection - two postcard portraits of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, circa 1914

The original photographs were taken by the Boissonnas & Eggler studio, favored by the Imperial family at that time for their formal portraits.

This card is German; it was not at all unusual at the time for European postcards to portray the royal families of - other - countries. Of course,
the Empress was also German by birth. (Hessen und bei Rhein, to be specific). It should be noted, too, that the Empress' figure has been un-
necessarily slimmed by retouching here, both fore and aft.

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Another pose from the same sitting.

A slightly different crop of the first image.

The tiara worn by the Empress in these photographs. It was originally made for the Empress Elisaveta Alexeievna, the wife
of Tsar Alexander I, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Catalogued during the period the Bolsheviks were selling
off many of the country's Imperial-era treasures, it has not been seen since the mid-Twenties and is presumed broken up.

Two girls in wartime - Grand Duchesses Maria and Anastasia Nikolaevna, 1915

In 1914, at the commencement of what would come to be called "The Great War" - World War I - the ladies of the Imperial family and of the Russian aristocracy quickly moved to organize and supply hospitals for the wounded, to work as administrators of hospitals under their patronage; many trained as nurses and actually assisted in surgery and in the care of the wounded. The Empress set up several hospitals and took a great interest in the overall running of hospitals during the war. She made visits to those at the front, especially, but her main focus was the hospitals she'd set up near her home at Tsarskoe Selo. She and her two elder daughters had trained as nurses and spent much of the war serving in that capacity, both in the operating room and in the wards; most days they would don their Red Cross nurse's uniforms and walk or drive to the nearby hospitals and report for work.

The Empress's two younger daughters - Maria was sixteen in the Spring of 1915, Anastasia, fourteen - were considered too young for nursing duties. But they had a hospital at Tsarskoe Selo under their patronage, where they would go to visit with the wounded soldiers - many not much older than they - and plays cards and checkers and billiards with them. Both girls were very down-to-earth and became good friends with many of "their" soldiers.

I've seen many photographs of ladies of the Imperial family taken during the war, nursing - wearing their characteristic nun-like Red Cross  uniforms - or visiting with the wounded. The two above caught my attention, though. I've spoken before about how the condition of some of the images of the last Imperial family - faded, stained, torn - often cause a shudder of foreshadowing, informed by what we know of their sad fate. The condition of these two make me wonder about something else, though: who did they belong to? How did they end up in this state? I wonder if either or both of these might have been kept by one of the soldiers in the picture. Only two years later, and for seven decades after, having an image of the Imperial family in one's possession could have been very compromising, even dangerous. The second, especially, looks to have been folded up, the folding causing most of the eventual damage. I have no way of knowing, but I like to think that this was kept, folded up and hidden away, by a soldier that the two young girls were friends with. A small, potent memory of his youth. When he had somehow managed to survive the wretched, filthy war. Was safe, in clean sheets, getting better each day. Looking forward to a game of cards with one of the Grand Duchesses. A kind and funny, pretty young girl. A girl like any young girl. His friend.

From my personal collection. By the size and texture of the paper, this looks to be from a journal printed during the war.