Wedgwood in the Empress’s Bedroom - Success or Failure?

Robin Emmerson, Author and Curator. Previously Curator of Decorative Arts, National Museums, Liverpool
The bedroom of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in her Summer Palace of Tsarskoe Selo was decorated with specially commissioned tablets of Wedgwood jasper. The room was destroyed in the Second World War and is now known only from photographs. A close reading of correspondence in the V&A/Wedgwood Archive reveals that the Empress’s architect Charles Cameron initially ordered more and larger jasper tablets than were finally installed. Wedgwood struggled with the order, making the largest jasper tablets he would ever make, but Cameron lost patience and reduced the size and number of tablets in the order to enable Wedgwood to deliver them without further delay. Wedgwood’s largest jasper tablets, made for the Empress, were therefore not sent to St Petersburg and destroyed with the rest of the bedroom. Instead they survive in the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool, and in Houston, Texas.