"Our restorers have completed work on the gilded furniture set (armchairs, chairs and sofas), which will decorate the Corner Drawing Room of Empress Alexandra in the Alexander Palace.
The Corner Drawing Room was originally adjacent to the Concert Hall, with a door between them placed on the hall's central axis. After Nicholas II's enthronement, a fundamental renovation of the palace's east wing began in 1895 to create private rooms for the imperial family. In 1902–4, the Concert Hall was rebuilt into the Maple Drawing Room and the State Study of the emperor. Then the Corner Drawing Room became connected to the corridor as part of the private imperial rooms, but at the same time it retained its ceremonial function.
The furnishings of the Corner Drawing Room, accumulated for over a century by that time, included objects from various epochs and yet reflected the tastes of the last imperial couple.
The furniture pieces were almost completely lost during the Nazi invasion of 1941-45. In order to remake the gilded set that adorned the room from the early 20th century until 1941, furniture pieces in the same classic style were selected. The set is restored by specialists from the Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop, who revived the Amber Room and many other interiors of Tsarskoe Selo. The restored gilded chairs and armchairs with oval backs and seats were made in the 1770s. Before World War II, they decorated the interiors of the Catherine Palace, the foyer of the Chinese Theatre in the Alexander Park and the White Hall of Gatchina Palace. Two sofas from the second half of the 19th century, now also included in the set, were handed over to Tsarskoe Selo by the State Hermitage in 1959.
The specialists removed all types of dirt, restored the gesso and gilding, re-created the lost carved details, and upholstered the pieces. Thanks to a fragment of a 1865 newspaper found in of one of the sofas' seat cushion together with the original horsehair filling, the object can be dated to that year.
The chairs, armchairs and sofas share the same stylistic unity, as well as the upholstery fabric. According to post-1917 descriptions of the palace interiors, the Corner Drawing Room had “Russian furniture of the Louis XVI style of the late 18th century, re-gilded and upholstered in silk of the Sapozhnikov factory in Moscow, in the style of striped fabrics of Louis XVI's era”. The fabric for the restored pieces was re-created based on a fragment of the original 1903 upholstery for the Corner Drawing Room set, which had been preserved in our collection. The surviving fragment has a pattern of alternating light stripes and stripes of various shades of pink with small ornaments of roses, flower garlands and wavy lines."
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