Jakob Philipp Hackert

Probably commissioned from the artist by Pierre Gaspard, Comte d'Orsay (1748-1809) in 1776 (see Literature).

Probably J. G. Meusel, Miscellaneen artistischen InhaltsI, Erfurt 1779, vol. II, p. 62-63 (as "...Philipp Hackert, a German, author of all the paintings of the last Russian war against the Turks for the empress of Russia, has copied the painting with a burning, exploding ship for the cabinet of the Count d`Orsay...")

The canvas is lined. There are fine lines of craquelure. Under UV pigment fluoresces in areas in the sky, the explosion at center, and the boat at left, but varnish prevents a conclusive analysis. Held in a gold painted wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Upon his arrival in Rome in 1768 Jacob Philip Hackert was presented by his friend, the antiquarian Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein (1719-1793), to his future patron the Russian Count Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov (1727-1797), founder of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Shuvalov was in search of a painter to immortalize the victories of the Russian fleet over the Turks in July 1770, and he commissioned Hackert to paint two paintings illustrating the main episodes of the war, including the Battle of Chesme Bay. Having accepted the commission, Hackert travelled to Livorno to meet Admiral Alexej Orlov (1737-1809), commander of the Russian fleet. Orlov provided Hackert with the necessary details and decided, with the approval of Catherine II, that the commission should be extended to cover six pictures for which a contract was signed on 7^th October 1771 stipulating payment of 375 golden Roman "Zecchine“ per picture.¹ The Russian Empress was very pleased with the results and in 1773 another six paintings were ordered to complete the first series. All twelve canvases can still be admired in the Great Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg.²

As part of the original commission Hackert painted the Battle of Chesme Bay, which is signed and dated 1771. At the beginning of 1772 he took this painting to Livorno for his patrons’ approval; however Shuvalov and Orlov deemed the explosion depicted inaccurate and decided to stage a demonstration for the artist’s sake. On the 27^th April 1772 at ten o’clock in the evening, the frigate “St. Paul” (in any case no longer seaworthy) was detonated, and the explosion was witnessed by a great number of spectators such as for example William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who witnessed the event on the top of the house of the British envoy Sir John Dick. Hackert himself must have taken position in a small boat from where he could sketch the event and this demonstration prompted him to alter the details of the explosion before it was sent to St. Petersburg later that year.

In the fall of 1771, immediately after the contract with Shuvalov had been signed, Hackert executed a number of small preparatory gouache paintings to serve as models for his oil paintings.³ The gouache for the Battle of Chesme differs from the St. Petersburg picture in the rendering of the explosion which would suggest that it was executed before the events in the harbour of Livorno. Since the commission of the Empress included a repetition of the painting already sent to St. Petersburg, the artist used the gouache as a model for the large canvas today in the Great Palace in Peterhof.⁴ Given the critical acclaim that these works garnered, Hackert executed copies of the whole series in the second half of the 1770’s for Prince Nicolai Yusupov (1750-1831); these canvases where destroyed in a fire in 1820.⁵ 

The present picture is a reduced copy of the second Peterhof Palace version which may have been commissioned for Pierre Gaspard Marie Grimaud d`Orsay (1748-1809), Comte d`Orsay, a famous art collector of art who travelled through Europe after the death of his wife in 1772. In 1776 he was in Rome where he would have seen Hackert at work on the Yusupov copies. As Johann Georg Meusel records in Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts (1779), “Philipp Hackert, a German, author of all the paintings of the last Russian war against the Turks for the empress of Russia, has copied the painting with a burning, exploding ship for the cabinet of the count d`Orsay.”⁶ Meusel’s use of the word ‘cabinet’ implies that the picture must have been small in format, and we can speculate given the French provenance that this work corresponds to the picture purchased by the Comte d’Orsay.

We are grateful to Dr. Claudia Nordhoff for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs.

1. A copy of the contract is conserved in Weimar, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv;
2. See Nikolai Nikulin (ed.), Jacob Philipp Hackert, St. Petersburg 1998, cat. nos. 20-31;
3. Ibid, cat. nos. 6-19;
4. Ibid, p. 78, cat. no. 24, reproduced;
5. Ibid, p. 102;
6. J.G. Meusel, Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts, Leipzig 1779, vol. II, p. 62-63.