CIRCA 1785

By the time Catherine of Russia commissioned this service, the baroque style of her earlier Chinese service had been superseded by a restrained neoclassical aesthetic. Catherine also commissioned famed dinner services from Sèvres and Wedgwood and was certainly fully aware of the very latest fashions. Despite the "Tea Road" between China and Russia, active since 1689 when Russia assumed power over Siberia, Catherine's Chinese porcelain was likely ordered through one of the European trading companies. James Christen Steward wrote, "It was probably from Friedrich II of Prussia that Catherine learned that an art collection of the first rank could serve her imperial ambitions almost as effectively as an imperial army" (The Private Taste of the Romanovs in Eighteenth-Century Russia). Catherine was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst; her parents ordered the elaborate Anhalt armorial service from China.