The Drawing Room

The Drawing Room is the central room of the ground floor. Its huge bay windows and paned balcony doors link the interior of the "rural house" with the surrounding natural environment. The jardinieres woven with greenery, the garlands of creepers, flowers on the windows, vases with bouquets of garden and wild flowers create an illusion of a country life.

Objects of decorative and applied art play a great role in the image of the Drawing Room. A real masterpiece is a set of candelabra and clock in the form of the facade of Rouen Cathedral made by the Russian master craftsmen at the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the 1830s. Set on the mantelpiece is a pair of vases produced at the Sèvres Porcelain Factory in the 1800s. The vases are decorated with painted designs on subjects borrowed from Virgil's poem Georgica. Presented to Alexander I by Napoleon in 1807, during the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit, they were preserved in the Cottage Palace as a memory of Nicholas I's elder brother. On the other mantelpiece is a clock produced in France about 1834 in the shape of Reims Cathedral, the traditional coronation place of the French Kings.

On the walls of the Drawing Room are canvases by French landscape painters of the Romantic trend - Theodore Gudin and Philippe Tanneur - as well as a number of early works by Ivan Aivazovsky: Venice (1842), a pair of genre Oriental Scenes (1846) and A View of the Stock Exchange in St Petersburg (1847). Totally there are thirteen works by this celebrated Russian master in the Cottage Palace.