In this seminar, Emily Roy introduces the work of Benjamin Patersen, a Swedish artist who captured St Petersburg during an unprecedented period of intensive development.
The Swedish painter and printmaker, Benjamin Patersen (c.1750 - c.1815) captured some of the most iconic images of St Petersburg at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike his contemporary vedutisti, Patersen showed both the centre and the outskirts of the city, populated with lively staffage that engaged with the development of genre painting in Russia at the time. Despite the visage of truthfulness, Patersen freely combined real and imagined or projected architectural ensembles, often working from the designs of architects. His views helped define the image of the young capital as an elegant, modern city, dressed in stone. They were popular among the imperial family and the nobility and provided ample material for copyists in print and designers in the decorative arts for decades.
This paper considers a curious and unstudied element of Patersen’s work: the proliferation of building sites and stonemasonry in his urban views. It considers how these images of the city under construction contributed to mythmaking about the capital, both at home and abroad. An examination of Patersen’s production methods, advertising and audience also reveals him as a fascinating case-study of a period in which Russian print culture was overwhelmingly state-controlled, but with the beginnings of entrepreneurial publishing.
Emily Roy is a doctoral candidate working on an AHRC-funded collaborative studentship between the University of Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her research concerns printed views of St Petersburg and explores questions of modernisation, cultural exchange, and innovation in Russian print culture. Her primary material is the Talbot Collection at the Ashmolean, a unique and little-known resource of c.1500 prints and books dating from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Previously she was a curator at Waddesdon Manor (The National Trust, Rothschild Collections), specialising in applied and decorative arts. She completed her BA in History of Art at Oxford University and her MA in Russian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL.
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