AMSTERDAM — In 1777, Catherine the Great of Russia commissioned a table service of more than 60 pieces for her lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, a celebrated military commander of the Russo-Turkish Wars. It was common for royals and nobles to present one another with lavish gifts of porcelain, which was, at that time, considered more valuable than silver and bronze and often called “white gold.”
The Cameo Service, as it is known, is one of the highlights of “Dining With the Tsars,” an exhibition on view through March 1 at the Hermitage Amsterdam, the Dutch outpost of Russia’s State Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. The show invites visitors to experience, by way of tableware, the sumptuous banquets the Romanovs held during their imperial tenure. With 700 to 800 pieces of porcelain among the roughly 1,000 objects on display, the show also provides a glimpse into the culture surrounding royal dinner parties, and the universe of artisans and artists employed to supply them.
Catherine’s gift, ordered from the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory in Paris, stood out as particularly exquisite: Each dish, bowl, cup and serving item featured carved and painted imitation cameos, miniature works of art, based on models from the Russian Royal collection. Sixty designs with subjects from Greek and Roman history and mythology served as models, too, for engraved cartouches, hand-painted by Jean-Baptiste-Étienne Genest, head of the Sèvres painting workshop.
The most striking feature of the set, however, was the coloration: repeated gold vignettes with tiny rosettes painted atop a turquoise-tinted, sky-blue ground. To make the special enamel seep into the porcelain, each piece had to be fired three or four times. The work on this project required more than half the painters at the Sèvres factory and a third of its gilders.
Such craftsmanship did not come cheap. When presented with a bill of 331,317 French livres — approximately $70,000 at the time, the equivalent of about $40 million to $50 million today — Catherine balked and refused to pay. The service was sent to Potemkin, but her debt to the factory remained for 20 years. She finally relented in 1792, during the French Revolution, when Sèvres was about to fold because of financial difficulties. She paid her bill, saving the factory, according to legend.
The service is in nearly perfect condition, despite being more than 200 years old. About 700 pieces from the collection have survived dinner parties of more than 1,000 guests in the 18th century, a fire that swept through the Winter Palace in 1837 and the siege of Leningrad in World War II.
Twenty-four complete settings are presented on a single table, along with bottle and glass coolers (which would have been filled with ice), ice cream cups and sweets bowls, compote containers, slop bowls (into which to empty the dregs of cold tea before pouring in a fresh, hot cup), coffee pots and milk jugs, and the single surviving teapot of the set. Unlike most exhibitions of porcelain settings, the items in this show are not showcased in vitrines, but exhibited openly, separated from visitors by only abstract metal chairs that serve as a kind of barrier.
“People are really invited to be guests at the dinner table with the czars,” said Marlies Kleiterp, head of exhibitions at the Hermitage Amsterdam.
This exhibition, she said, is a follow-up to a popular exhibition about the Russian czars that the Hermitage Amsterdam presented at its inauguration five years ago. That show, “At the Russian Court: Palace and Protocol in the 19th Century,” which ran from June 2009 through January 2010, had 705,000 visitors.
The galleries in other exhibition halls put the banquets themselves into context, explaining how guests were invited to the imperial parties, what kinds of clothes they were expected to wear and how the dishes were served — in the 18th century, à la Française, or buffet style, and in the 19th century, à la Russe, served one course after another.
The museum has reproduced some of the original menus from special dinners, including one on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander III in 1881, and one for the 300th Jubilee of the House of Romanov on May 13, 1913.
Some of the 18th-century recipes used by chefs at the Russian royal court have been recreated by chefs at Bridges Restaurant in Amsterdam’s Grand Hotel, near the Hermitage, and offered as a special menu to coincide with the exhibition.
The wall of one gallery features Catherine’s rules of etiquette for her parties. They include: “Do not sigh or yawn. Neither bore or fatigue others.” “Be merry but do not spoil nor break anything.” And the all-important, “Drink in moderation so that you can find your legs on leaving these doors.”
In addition to the Cameo set, the show includes several other large table service sets. Another highlight is the Berlin dessert service that Frederick II, king of Prussia, gave to Catherine at the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1778. Porcelain figurines that are part of the service depict Catherine surrounded by her people and Turkish prisoners of war. The plates themselves depict different scenes from the history of the war.
“Frederick gave her this service to express his appreciation,” Ms. Kleiterp said. “It was not just a decorative set. It was also meant to be a discussion piece.”
The show spans the 18th and 19th centuries, with the reign of Catherine regarded as the pinnacle of the Romanov dynasty. But even after the Revolution of 1917, banqueting was still an important aspect of Russian diplomatic relations.
The final tableware showcase in the exhibition is a set created by the Herend Porcelain Manufactory of Hungary in 1949, commissioned as a gift from the Hungarian Ministry of Heavy Industry to Stalin. The dinner and dessert service of more than 600 items was never used, but it was shared with the Russian people and added to the State Hermitage’s extensive collection.