A Russian Dream in Washington:
The Hillwood Museum
You and your companion enter the two-story foyer, and your eyes are
seized by imposing portraits of Russian rulers – Nicholas I, Nicholas II, and Catherine
the Great in full state regalia. On a commode, you both admire two striking
nineteenth-century Imperial Porcelain Factory vases, resplendent in their golden
background and adorned with brightly colored pigeons, turning the most ordinary of birds
into special creatures.
 Entranced, you begin to wander through the richly furnished rooms, the
priceless Russian objets d’art continuing to appear before you, as if descending from
heaven.
You both know you cannot possibly remember all the treasures that you
see, but some will never escape your collective memory: over twenty porcelain pieces of
the famous Orlov Service Catherine the Great commissioned for her then-favorite, the Count
Grigorii; the Boyar Wedding Feast (1883) by Konstantin Makovskii, a canvas evocative of
Russia’s unique past; and an early 18th century portable iconostasis, a jewel of
religious art, evidently commissioned by an Old Believer.
Then there are the famous Fabergé eggs, including the Catherine the
Great Easter Egg, by workmaster Henrik Wigströman, and the twelve-paneled Monogram Easter
Egg, a gift from Nicholas II and Alexandra to his mother, Maria Fedorovna. You look at an
elegant, understated Fabergй leaf-shaped box of gold, bloodstone, and diamonds and you
share thoughts on his statement that “I am less interested in an expensive object, if
its high cost is only because many diamonds and pearls have been planted on it.”
Each of you wants to spend hours admiring every object, but an
unquenchable desire to discover new ones drives you on. There is no strict order to how
the treasures are arranged, and this makes you even more curious. As delight follows
delight through a dozen rooms, you reach a display area with colorful icons and richly
embroidered Russian liturgical vestments.
The icons reflect images that have existed in Russian religious art
since medieval times, and many of them are copies. But they are striking nevertheless,
enriching a room with vivid hues where a monumental, diamond-studded chalice from
Catherine the Great’s reign demands most of your attention.
Where are you? Are you awake or asleep? Could you be dreaming dreams
like Sokurov’s film “Russian Ark,” the director’s hallucinatory peregrinations
inside the Hermitage?
Wake Up!
No, no, wake up, you are in the real world, if indeed such a term can
be used to describe Washington, D.C. You are in the U.S. capital’s leafy northwest
region, a residential neighborhood a 30-minute’s drive from the center of the city. Your
location is the interior of the Georgian-style mansion, designed in 1926, that was the
residence of the enormously rich cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the later
years of her life. It is known, today, as the Hillwood Museum.
The mansion is located in a 25-acre paradise with gardens, meticulous
lawns, and charming waterworks, a recreation of the American country house tradition. Mrs.
Post’s American-style palace was “created by wealthy Americans between 1880 and
1930” who “commissioned large houses for escape and relaxation on relatively limited
tracts of land near major urban centers.” (These words are taken from Hillwood’s
elucidating website, gratefully used in writing this article).
In the late 1930s, Mrs. Post, always fascinated by Europe, spent 18
months in the Soviet Union with her then-husband, Joseph Davies, the American ambassador
en poste in Moscow at that time (1937-38). Long interested in art, and armed with sharp
eye, she began to collect Russian objects.
In Russia, she wrote, she was able “to see and enjoy the Russian love
of color in all forms of art. …The Russian genius in the use of stimulating color is a
spiritual quality related to the land itself.” Soon, “she found herself scouring
Stalin’s warehouses on hands and knees,” says Frederick J. Fisher, Executive Director
of the Hillwood Museum. “The revolutionary government already had sold off much of its
confiscated gold, silver and artworks to raise hard currency. But [Mrs. Post] spotted
treasures in the remains. ‘She made piles every day,” recalled daughter Dina Merrill
Hartley. ‘The prices were so amazingly low [because] they really didn’t know what they
had.’”
Among Mrs. Post’s contacts in the Soviet Union was Polina
Zhemchuzhina, wife of Chairman of the Council of Ministers Viacheslav Molotov who, as
Davies points out in his Mission to Moscow, had established “very chic perfume
shops and cosmetic beauty parlors” in Stalin’s harsh proletarian state. Vases that can
be seen as one goes out of the hall leading into the Russian porcelain room were gifts of
Madame Zhemchuzhina to the wife of the American ambassador.
 After her stay
in the U.S.S.R., Mrs. Post collected Russian art for the rest of her life. On her death in
1957, Hillwood was bequeathed to the public as a museum – a “museum,” however, which
still very much remains Mrs. Post’s residence, for she is there in spirit, “like a
whiff of perfume with staying power,” in the words of journalist Gary Tischler.
Hillwood’s collection now contains some 18,000 items, with some 60
percent of them on display – along with paintings and porcelain, there are works in
glass, textiles, and metal.
Guided by the model of its ever-collecting founder, Hillwood continues
to acquire rare Russian items. In 2000, to cite one of many examples, it obtained the
Avinoff-Shoumatoff book collection that includes important and hard-to-find volumes on
pre-revolutionary Russian religious art, decorative arts, archeology, and art history.
It will not disappoint cosmopolitan Russophiles to learn that a large
number of the items at Hillwood are not Russian. Mrs. Post obtained many 18th and 19th
century objects made in other countries, including France (especially) and England. Much
of the elegant furniture in her residence comes from these two nations, as well as from
other places in Europe. Perhaps most famous among these is a 1770 mechanical roll-top desk
made in the French tradition with more than 40 drawers and pigeonholes, pop-up
candlesticks, shades and snuffers. It may have been meant for Marie Antoinette before she
married the soon-to-be Louis XVI of France.
The Empress and the Heiress
The crown jewel among these European treasures, however, is
Hillwood’s collection of Russian decorative art, the largest of its kind outside of
Russia. Hillwood would not be Hillwood without its Fabergй eggs and portraits of the
tsars (and its icons). Mrs. Post was fully aware of this, and her desire to show
Russia’s importance in European culture links her to the tsarina one first encounters on
canvass upon entering Hillwood – Catherine the Great.
These strong-willed women had much in common. True, they lived in
different centuries and in different countries. But they both were entranced by beauty, in
the sense expressed by La Fontaine in his memorable verses:
“Ф douce Voluptй, sans qui, dиs notre enfance,
Le vivre et le mourir nous deviendraient йgaux.”
(“Without sweet enrapture, from our infancy on,
Our living and dying would be one and the same.”)
A love of art, both Russian and French, is what brings Catherine the
Great and Merriweather Post the closest together, but other aspects of their lives were
similar. Both represented royalty – different kinds of royalty, to be sure, but royalty
nevertheless.
 Catherine
was an eighteenth-century German princess. Mrs. Post was twentieth-century democratic
America’s version of a princess, a person who in her youth had “more than double the
clothes, shoes and stuff than any girl no matter how rich should have at seventeen,” her
father (the man who gave us Corn Flakes) wrote about his only darling daughter before a
1904 European trip. (The second floor at Hillwood, which contains some of Mrs. Post’s
personal sartorial accoutrements, reflects her very haute-couture inclinations).
Both Catherine and Mrs. Post, feminists before their time (while
retaining their exquisite feminine tastes), did not let devotion to one man become the
determining factor of their lives. Mrs. Post was married and divorced four times, and
Catherine’s many love affairs reflect her well-known penchant for masculine diversity.
Both women evidently felt men could share their interest in beauty, but Catherine and
Merriweather were not ready to sacrifice the latter for the former.
The aristocratic mores of these two princesses, perhaps amoral and
libertine to some, may offend our modern bourgeois sensibilities. But it is undeniable
that the Empress’s and the heiress’s life-long devotion to the sublime have earned
them a special place in the pantheon of esthetes who, to some extent accidentally, have
made it possible for us to enrich our lives through art…
The Dream Continues
Wait! Your Hillwood Russian dreams are yet not over. As you are about
to exit the Post mansion, you hear Russian voices: one of the many volunteer guides at
Hillwood, originally from Russia, is speaking to a visitor from her native land in their
common tongue. You then step outside, en plein air, refreshed by the greenery, flowers,
and quietude around you (visits to Hillwood are by appointment only and there is a limit
to the number of visitors admitted per day). You think of the verses of Baudelaire:
“…tout n’est qu’ordre et beautй,
Luxe, calme et voluptй.”
Strolling unhurried about the refreshing Hillwood grounds, you come
upon a dacha – yes, a dacha: are you really in a city associated with the White House,
not Russian huts? Inside that quaint one-room log structure (built in 1969), appears
another miracle: a temporary exhibit of ceramics by the Hungarian-born Eva Zeisel, who
directed a glass and porcelain manufacturer for the Soviet Union before World War II. Her
work, though intensely modern, has a softness and gentility reminiscent of the 18th
century porcelains in the main building.
You do not want to leave, but it is time to go. It is five o’clock,
and Hillwood is closing. You will miss sipping afternoon tea at Hillwood’s welcoming and
civilized cafй, where the polished manners of waiters match those of their long departed
Russian imperial confreres.
Your minds are full of beauty, you both are in a daze. But you cannot
help but wonder: Should the Russian objects at Hillwood have remained in Russia? Is that
where they truly belong? You ask yourselves the question, and cannot find an answer.
But in your hearts, while holding hands, you think with gratitude of
Merriweather Post, of her Hillwood Museum and – above all – of Russia itself.
By John Brown
John Brown was Cultural Attachй at the American Embassy in
Moscow, 1998-2001. He compiles a near-daily “Public Diplomacy Press Review,” available
free by requesting it at http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbrown_main
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