Peter I on His Death Bed
1725
- oil on canvas. 77 х 64
Received in 1941 from the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR (as part of the collection of the Department of History of Everyday Life, State Russian Museum); earlier (from 1848) – the Emperor Peter I Gallery of the Imperial Hermitage; from 1812 – collection of Mikhail Antonovsky; collection of E. I. Chernysheva (according to legend, a gift of Empress Elizabeth of Russia in the early 1740s).- State Hermitage, St. Petersburg
In 1848 when the art restorer Fyodor Tabunstsov was working on the Gallery of Peter the Great, he extended the canvas around the perimeter and painted pillows and a coverlet. Alexadner Vasilchikov, who saw the painting after it had been changed, wrote that “the only ancient piece on the painting is the head”; also, he attributed the picture to Johann Gottfried Tannauer. The central part of the picture is a study for a post-mortem portrait of Peter the Great that the artist created as desired by Catherine Petrovna when the emperor’s remains were moved to his ceremonial bed in the Great Hall of the Winter Palace. M.I. Antonovsky, librarian of the Imperial Academy of Arts, gave the painting to Emperor Alexander I in 1812. It was I.G. Kotelnikova who attributed the picture to Louis Caravaque.