The image of Anna Ioannovna is after a portrait by Louis Caravaque, official portrait painter to the imperial court. Prior to the establishment of the Academy of Arts as an adjunct to the Academy of Sciences in 1724, Louis Caravaque ran an informal school of painting, based in the St Petersburg Post Office. Peter the Great had contracted him ‘to teach painting to such persons of the Russian nation as His Majesty shall send to him’. The flat brushwork might indicate that the artist was trained in the icon tradition, rather than being a pupil of the emerging Russian Academy. The Empress is believed to have sat for Caravaque c.1730, on her succession to the throne after the death of her cousin, Peter II. She is depicted with the Imperial symbols of the crown and the sash of the Order of St Andrew. Empress Anna was the daughter of Tsar Ivan V (1666–96), half brother of Peter I, and his wife, Praskovia Saltykova (1664–1723). She ruled as regent of Courland (a province in what is now Western Latvia) from 1711 to 1730, after the death of her husband, Frederick William, Duke of Courland (1692–1711), a mere two weeks after their marriage. She returned to St Petersburg in February 1730, as Peter II had recently succumbed to smallpox with no clear heir. A series of ‘Conditions’ were presented to the new Empress by Peter II’s Privy Council, which she promptly dissolved. Some critics have named her reign ‘the Age of Biron’, in acknowledgement of her close personal relationship with her German advisor, Ernst Johann Biron (1690–1772), who is suspected of influencing her many ‘Westernising’ foreign and domestic policies.

Text adapted from Russia: Art, Royalty & the Romanovs, London, 2018.