Notes on Contributors
Cynthia Coleman Sparke
is an independent researcher, author, and lecturer on Russian pre-Revolutionary works of art. Previously, Cynthia ran the Russian Department for Christie’s Inc. in New York and worked for Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC, and The Alexander Palace Project for the World Monuments Fund in St Petersburg. Her book Russian Decorative Arts was published in 2014 by the Antique Collectors’ Club.
Anthony Cross
is Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1989. He was the founder of the “Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia,” which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Anglo-Russian cultural relations have been at the centre of his research and writing since the publication of his very first article in 1964. His book By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge University Press, 1997) was awarded both the Alexander Nove Prize by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Antsiferov Prize by the Likhachev Foundation in St Petersburg.
Caroline de Guitaut, LVO
is Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Works of Art at Royal Collection Trust. She was co-curator of the 2018 exhibition “Russia, Royalty and the Romanovs” (with Stephen Patterson), and author and joint editor of the accompanying catalogue. Her publications on Russian art include Fabergé in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (forthcoming), Russia: Art, Royalty and the Romanovs (Royal Collection Trust, 2018), “Fabergé and the Gold-making tradition in Russia,” in Scythians and Early Eurasian Nomads (British Museum conference proceedings, 2018), Royal Fabergé (2011), and Fabergé in the Royal Collection (2003).
Louise Hardiman
is an independent scholar specialising in Russian and Soviet art and the history of British-Russian cultural exchange. She has a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge and is an Advisory Board member of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. Her publications include: the co-edited volumes Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives (Open Book Publishers, 2017) and “Abramtsevo and Its Legacies: Neo-National Art, Craft, and Design,” Experiment/Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture (Brill, 2019); The Story of Synko-Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales (as translator) (2019) and Why the Bear Has No Tail and other Russian Folk Tales (as editor) (2014). Current book projects include a history of British interest in Russian art during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and a study of the Russian “Arts and Crafts” movement focused on its links with the west.
Ekaterina Heath
has a Ph.D from the University of Sydney (2018), which examines the influence of Empress Maria Feodorovna on Pavlovsk Park over a period of fifty years (1777–1828) and, in particular, the ways in which the empress used plants, garden design, and art to promote her agenda at the Russian court. Heath’s research interests include the history of botany, cultural meanings of plants around the turn of nineteenth century, and European garden history. She has presented her research at events including the ISECS Early Career Researchers Seminar (Enlightenment and Peasant); the Sofia and David Nichol Smith Seminar, Sydney and Brisbane; and the College Art Association (CAA). Heath is a lecturer and course coordinator (Early Modern Art) at the University of Sydney. She is researching a book on Russian chinoiserie in the eighteenth century (co-written with Professor Jennifer Milam).
Allison Leigh
is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is a specialist in European and Russian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and her first book, Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Dr Leigh has published on topics ranging from the cultural bilingualism of Russian portraiture in the eighteenth century to the prescriptions for masculine conduct among military officers in the 1840s. In 2021, she received an ATLAS Grant (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) from the Louisiana Board of Regents to complete a book project currently entitled The Art of Misogyny: Toxic Masculinity from Delacroix to Picasso.
Irina Marisina
is Leading Researcher in the Department of Russian Art (1700–1917), Theory and History of Arts Research Institute, Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow. She has a Ph.D in History of Art from Moscow State University (1990) and is the author of several publications on Russian art and culture of the eighteenth to early nineteenth century, and the history of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg (1750s–1830s), including its evolution, artists, and international relations with Europe and the Americas. She has also jointly edited several essay collections on Russian art. Marisina has spoken at conferences in Russia and the UK, as well as coordinating and participating in annual conferences on Russian art at the Academy of Arts in Moscow.
Stephen Patterson
was Head of Collections Information Management, Royal Collection Trust until December 2020. He was co-curator of the exhibition “Russia, Royalty and the Romanovs” in 2018–19 and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. During his thirty-three years in the Royal Household, Patterson researched Russian works in the Royal Collection and published and lectured in Britain and Europe on orders, decorations, and insignia; he is the author of Royal Insignia: British and Foreign Orders of Chivalry from the Royal Collection (Merrell Holberton, 1996).
Elizaveta Renne
has been Keeper of British and Scandinavian Paintings (16th–20th centuries) at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg since 1980. She has a Ph.D in History and Theory of Art from St Petersburg State University (2003). Her publications include the State Hermitage Museum Catalogue. Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century British Painting (Yale University Press, 2011) and Zhivopis′ skandinavskikh stran i Finlandii XIII–XX vekov: katalog kollektsii (State Hermitage Museum, 2018). She has curated many Hermitage museum exhibitions, including “Christina Robertson. A Scottish Portraitist at the Russian Court” (Edinburgh, 1996), “British Treasures from the Hermitage Collection” (New Haven, 1996), “400 years of Western European Painting,” and “Catherine the Greatest” (Amsterdam, 2014–15).
Wendy Slater
studied Russian at the University of Cambridge, then completed an MA at Manchester and a Ph.D at Cambridge in contemporary Russian history. She has held academic appointments at Cambridge, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and the University of Manchester. She also writes about current developments in Russia for The Annual Register, of which she is joint editor, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Her book, The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II (Routledge, 2007), explores narrative and visual representations of Russia’s last tsar in contemporary western and Russian culture. Her current projects include a history of twentieth-century Russia in ten discrete narratives.
Olga Sobolev
is Reader in Comparative Literature at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests concern nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and European culture. Recent publications include From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920 (Peter Lang, 2017), “Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Russia,” in Reception of Tennyson in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2016), “The Symbol of the Symbolists: Alexander Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon,” in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon (Open Book Publishers, 2017), The Only Hope of the World: G. B. Shaw and Russia (Peter Lang, 2012), and The Silver Mask: Harlequinade in the Symbolist Poetry of Blok and Bely (Peter Lang, 2008).
Zalina Tetermazova
is Curator of Prints at the State Historical Museum, Moscow, specializing in eighteenth-century Russian art and its international contexts. She is a graduate of Lomonosov Moscow State University, where her Ph.D dissertation (2020) examined the relationship between Russian portrait painting and printmaking in the second half of the eighteenth century. Her other areas of research interest include British art, Old Master prints and drawings, and the relationship between word and image. Tetermazova writes and lectures on the history of Russian and western European art.