The Orloff service
Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796), a German princess, born Sophie-Frédérique-Augusta von Anhalt, was chosen by Empress Elisabeth to marry her son and heir to the throne, the future Peter III, in order to strengthen the ties between the two nations. The union, celebrated in 1745, was not a happy one and the young woman overthrew her husband in 1762 becoming Catherine II. This annexation of the throne was made possible by the Orloff brothers, including Gregory (1734-1783), her favorite.

An enlightened despot, she strengthened national unity by reforming the provinces, annexed Crimea and Poland and suppressed internal revolts. A Francophile, she was interested in the spirit of the Enlightenment, corresponding with Voltaire in particular and inviting him to stay with her in 1773. She even bought his library at his death in 1778. She also wrote fourteen theatre pieces in french. She was also known as an art lover. She inherited the collections of the Tsarina Elisabeth and bought many collections including the paintings of Johann Gotkowski in 1764 and those of Robert Walpole’s descendants in 1779. In order to decorate the various palaces of her vast empire, she ordered large silver services from the silversmiths of the European capitals Paris, London, Berlin but also St Petersburg. Thus, services were created for the palaces of Kazan, Riga, Nizhny Novgorod and Ekaterinoslav.

For her own service, Catherine could admire the Paris service made for her mother-inlaw by François-Thomas Germain in 1756. However, the tsarina did not want any more rocaille and its asymmetrical forms, she wanted a service in the era with innovative designs. For this purpose she commissioned the sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, a regular at the Court since his arrival in 1766, to have a service made for about sixty people. This order is very well documented thanks to the correspondence between the tsarina and the sculptor. Thus on February 13, 1770, she wrote “I have heard that you have drawings of silver service; I will see them gladly if you show them to me, because the fantasy could well take me to order one for about sixty persons”. (L. Reau, Correspondance de Falconet avec Catherine II, 1767-1778, Paris, 1921).

Falconet requested several designs from various silversmiths like Spriman and finally chose the Roëttiers family to execute this fabulous order of more than three thousand pieces including eight pots-à-oille (circular), eight tureens (oval), forty-eight pairs of torches, hundreds of plates and thousands of place settings. In 1771, she added to her initial order chocolate pots, milk jugs and stoves. The total cost of this service is estimated at one million two hundred thousand pounds (Foelkersam, Inventaire de l’argenterie conservée dans les garde-meubles des palais impériaux, St Petersburg, 1907).

The style of this service is innovative, inspired by the first excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum publications thanks to the King of the Two-Sicilies in the years 1750- 1760 and the rediscovery of the sober and delicate ancient style. No more scrolls or shells, but rosettes, flutes and laurel leaves which are found in the designs presented by the Roëttiers. This family of Antwerp origin is a great dynasty of goldsmiths and medal engravers. Jacques, born in 1707, received his training in the workshops of Thomas Germain and Nicolas Besnier. He was received as a master in 1733 and married MarieAnne Besnier, the daughter of his master, the following year. He collaborated with his father-in-law who gave up his apartment in the Louvre in 1751. Taking advantage of his fatherin-law’s position, he received prestigious orders and quickly became the King’s ordinary silversmith with his own lodging in the Louvre. His son Jacques-Nicolas began his apprenticeship in his father’s workshop in 1752 before becoming master in 1765. Father and son worked at the Court and made gold tableware for Madame du Barry.

When Falconet entrusted them with the order of Catherine II, through the intermediary of the company Barral, Chanony & compagnie, and after numerous exchanges of letters and revisions of the drawings, its realization was very fast, the tsarina did not intend to wait. She made the first payment on January 14, 1771 via her agent at the French court Nikolai Khotinski. The silversmiths immediately set to work, starting with the most important pieces, the pots-à-oille and the tureens. According to Falconet “they are encouraged to do well by the approval with which Your Majesty honored their sketches and I would be deceived if, for the execution, they did not make all that there can be of better in the kind”. The order was so large that the Roëttiers even had to subcontract certain pieces, such as the plates, to the silversmiths Edmé-Pierre Balzac and Claude-Pierre Deville to meet the deadlines.

Between May 1771 and September 1775, thirteen or fourteen shipments per boat were sent to deliver the service, the majority being delivered in eighteen months. The tsarina was very satisfied with the service, as she wrote to Falconet on August 18, 1771: “I am very happy that Mrs. Roitiers are satisfied; I am very happy with a dozen pieces of silver plate that I received from Paris a month ago”. Even if she had herself corrected and chosen the designs of this personal service, she did not enjoy it for long. Indeed, she offered this magnificent service to Gregory Orloff, her favorite for more than twelve years. Their relations have deteriorated for some time, Orloff has left to negotiate peace with the Ottomans in Folchany and Catherine has replaced Gregory with the young Alexander Vasiltchikov as her favorite.

The service is thus a gift of rupture, as she explains it to the elder brother Orloff, political adviser “the silver service, of French invoice, which is in the cabinet. I wish to give it to the count G.G with the one that was bought to Danish minister for our daily use “.

Gregory Orloff took this service with him during his exile in Holland and kept it some ten years until his death in 1783. Catherine II was very affected by this disappearance and wished to buy back the service to the heirs, as she confides it to her aide-de-camp Colonel Buxhoevden “that the mentioned service... be inventoried and weighed with their case and delivered to the persons in charge of the goldsmith’s shop of his Majesty Konstantin Kulichin and Ivan Rodionov”. She also wanted the Orloff family coat of arms to be removed, as evidenced by a letter from the court chancellor Aleksandr Bezborodko to Gregorii Nikitich Orloff “Her Majesty wishes to keep the service for general use and wishes the coat of arms to be removed”.

After the death of Catherine II in 1796, the service was kept in the imperial collections, undergoing successive castings in 1838, 1841 and 1849. From 1904 it remained in the Imperial Winter Museum where it is listed by Baron Foelkersam in 1907. He still listed eight hundred and forty-two pieces. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections were confiscated and the new Soviet government sold the pieces of the service in the 1920s through the Antikvariat agency and by mutual agreement in Berlin to the major collectors. The majority of the service was sold in Berlin in September 1930 at large auctions organized by Ball & Graupe. The French art dealer Jacques Helft acquired many lots which he then sold to the most important European collectors, such as a pair of pots-à-oille to Moïse de Camondo, pieces which are now kept in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Today, about two hundred and thirty pieces are listed in public collections (Louvre Museum, Hermitage Museum, Metropolitan Museum of New York) and in private collections. Some of them have been offered at auction, such as in 1971 in the David-Weill collection, in 1992 in the Ortiz-Patino collection in New York, and in 2011 in the Paul-Louis Weiller collection in Paris

The tureens and pots-à-oille are the most prestigious and important pieces of the service, they are the showcase of the new neoclassical style that will be in vogue from 1775 at the court of Versailles and throughout Europe. If the pots-à-oille are numbered from 1 to 8, the tureens are numbered from 9 to 16. The manufacture of these pieces is classical, in four parts, the feet and the decoration being added later, with the additional refinement of engraving the inside of the lid. Among these major pieces, a pot-à-oille is preserved in the Louvre Museum, one in the Metropolitan Museum of New York and a pair in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris; the soup tureens are preserved in the Kremlin State Museum in Moscow. The other pieces are kept in private collections or have been melted down.

Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers
The family context in which Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers (1736-1788) was born predestined him for an immense career, because of the already widely established reputation of his father, Jacques Roëttiers (1707-1784), one of the most famous goldsmiths of his time. Jacques had himself taken over the business from his father-in-law, Nicolas Besnier. Jacques Roëttiers, from a dynasty of medal engravers from Flanders, built his reputation for excellence partly on his skills as a draughtsman and sculptor, particularly visible on a commission, on December 6, 1734, which made him famous: that of making a table centrepiece for the duc de Bourbon, by order of the king, now in the Louvre Museum.

It is in this context that Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers, eldest son of Jacques Roëttiers, became his father’s apprentice at the age of sixteen, in the Galeries du Louvre. His apprenticeship contract stipulated that the apprentice was forbidden to work elsewhere; this clause does not seem to have been scrupulously respected insofar as Jacques Nicolas, in addition to attending philosophy classes at the Collège des Lombards, also tried his hand at painting and sculpture: on December 31, 1757, he was awarded the first prize for sculpture by the jury of the district to the students of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. This multidisciplinary training was tolerated if not encouraged by his father, who thought to perpetuate his business by training his son to excellence.

The company “Roëttiers père et fils” was born in 1762. In 1765, Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers was received as a master goldsmith in Paris and had his hallmark inscribed: “J N R, a sheaf of wheat”. The “Roëttiers père et fils” honored numerous court orders, in particular, the so-called “Orloff” service for Catherine II of Russia, in 1771-1772, probably one of the last orders honored by the silversmiths. They also received several orders from Mme du Barry, documented by the Goncourt brothers. After ten years of activity, the company was dissolved at the end of 1773: Jacques became a nobleman, as did his sons, by descent.

Their employment, which attached them to the service of the king, could “give rise to doubts about a derogation to the quality of noble” (Letters Patent, February 1772, folios 54 to 56). They were therefore obliged to stop working as goldsmiths. Jacques Nicolas was elected alderman of Paris in August 1775 and sold the family business and his house to Robert-Joseph Auguste in 1777. Becoming Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers de la Tour, he then engaged in wholesale trade and investments in industry; he became one of the pioneers in the establishment of the iron industry in Creusot.

Around 1784-1785, following bad business, Jacques Nicolas Roëttiers de la Tour returned to the practice of art and made busts of two dukes of Brissac as sculptor to Monsieur le Cardinal de Rohan. In 1786, he left France to settle in Madrid where he was accepted as a sculptor at the Academy of San Fernando. He died in this city on September 16, 1788.

Jacques Tuchendler, Les Roëttiers de La Tour et de Montaleau, Orfèvres, francs-maçons, industriels, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, 2016, Kronos, Editions S.P.M.

Carlier Yves, “Sculpture et orfèvrerie à Paris au XVIII siècle : Jacques et Jacques-Nicolas Roëttiers.” In: Revue de l’Art, 1994, n°105. pp. 61-69.