Russian

Russian furniture is a deliberate act of Westernisation. Peter the Great moved the court to a new city built on imported models, and from then on Russian taste followed France with a lag of about a generation — French craftsmen were imported, French forms were copied, and Russian workshops supplied the difference in material and scale that makes the result recognisable.

The aesthetic is imperial rather than domestic: gilt bronze, malachite and lapis, veneers of Karelian birch with its extraordinary figure, and a weight that assumes a palace rather than a house. The distinctive Russian note is the use of native materials at a scale no French workshop would have attempted.

The tradition ends abruptly in 1917, which is both the reason it is collectable and the reason provenance matters more here than almost anywhere else in the museum. Objects that left before the revolution and objects that left after it are different markets.

Peter's Westernisation (1700–1760) establishes the pattern: French forms, Russian materials, and a court that wanted to be seen as European.

Catherine and the Neoclassical decades (1760–1800) are the high point — mahogany, gilt bronze, and the birch veneers that became the national signature.

The long nineteenth century runs Empire forms through historicism to the eve of 1917, after which the tradition stops rather than evolves.