Christina Robertson

Self-portrait 1822

Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna

Christina Robertson née Saunders , Russian Кристина Робертсон (born December 17, 1796 in Kinghorn , County Fife , Scotland , † April 30, 1854 in St. Petersburg ) was a Scottish portrait painter and in later years court painter at the Russian court of the tsars.

Christina Saunders took painting lessons from her uncle, the portrait painter George Sa (u) nders (1774–1846) and began her career in his home in London .

She soon became a successful portrait painter and received numerous commissions, initially from Scottish clients for her miniatures, and later for oil and watercolor paintings. She became the first woman to become a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

From 1823 she was married to the miniature painter James Robertson and exhibited at the Royal Academy. She had her own studio until 1828. The following year she became the first honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy . In the 1830s, she left her husband and four children.

She worked in Paris in the mid-1830s and came to St. Petersburg in 1839, where she received many orders from the Tsar's court to replace the paintings and portraits of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and her three daughters Maria, Olga , which were destroyed in the fire in the Winter Palace in 1837 and to make Alexandra. Valentin Schertle transferred her portrait of the tsarina to lithography. Robertson was in St. Petersburg until 1841 and was made an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts in the same year .

In 1847 Robertson returned to St. Petersburg. In January 1849 she was invited again to the Winter Palace to paint portraits of the daughters-in-law of Nicholas I - Maria Alexandrovna and Alexandra Iosifovna.

In the last years of her life she could not return to England due to lack of money. Her death during the Crimean War , when the majority of the British colony in St. Petersburg left Russia, went unnoticed. The artist was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery.

literature

• Sara Gray: The Dictionary of British Women Artists (Online)
• Women in nineteenth-century Russia: lives and culture / edited by Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi. Cambridge, UK: OpenBook Publishers, 2012: Vol. 3, pp. 91-118: ISBN 9781906924652 .
• Emmanuel Benezit [ed.]; Jacques Busse [arr.]: Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays . 1976, Vol. IX, p. 13
• Witt Checklist 1978, p. 262

Web links

Commons : Christina Robertson  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Undiscovered Scotland