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Hats are off to Helen Scott Reed, Trust Secretary of the Board of Governors, from Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, who organized an exceptional Study Trip — Stockholm, Tallinn and St. Petersburg at the end of September. Twenty-six Trust members arrived in Stockholm (built on reclaimed land) and began a beautifully paced round of visits to the Vasa Ship Museum, the Royal Palace, the University town of Uppsala, the country home of Carl Linnaeus, 18th century botanist, and Drottningholm, a palace complex complete with a 1769 Chinese pavilion complex. One of our favorite places was Skokloster Castel, c. 1676, about one hour from Stockholm. This little-changed interior contained generations of Wrangel family collections, from Venetian light fixtures, to tapestries gained through war with Denmark, faux painted Classical hallways decorated with morality verses in Latin, Greek, Italian and English. Stylish and eclectic, Skokloster epitomizes the Hanseatic League influence of travel, knowledge, influence and wealth.
Traveling by ship, Trust members set out across the Baltic to Tallinn, Estonia, a successful medieval trading port. Our wonderful hotel was in the middle of the early walled town. The restoration accomplished since the end of Communism is wonderful and the spirit of the people is high with energy and great expectations for the future. We enjoyed a 16th century merchant’s feast there in an old stone building just off the main square, set with long candlelit tables and benches where food was served in crockery and wooden trenchers. The many dishes passed around included Orange and tongue jelly with horseradish cream, ovenbaked herb and juniper cheese, Almond Chicken, London merchant’s saffron pickles, Crusader's lentil sauce — all, again, reflecting the extensive international trade of the time.
Traveling out of town through dense forests to visit several grand manor estates, we passed several individual mushroom pickers. Sensing our interest, our guide asked the bus driver to stop on a side road where we all scattered through the woods finding many varieties of bountiful mushrooms. No wonder the central European cuisine is rich in this forest floor delectable. Again by ship, we journeyed to St. Petersburg (built on reclaimed land) and the glories of 18th and 19th century Russia. The royal palaces were monumental and gold gilt was everywhere. We visited The Hermitage three times and started with an introductory tour by curator Lisa Renne. The decorative arts collections were displayed in room settings of particular styles, spanning two centuries, and furniture from various sources — French, German, Italian, Russian, China, etc. The English silver was extraordinary especially an immense and ornate winecooler at least four feet tall and five feet wide. We realized that Catherine the Great would have made a terrific Trust member. She collected voraciously. For example, she bought Voltaire's collection of Houdon busts and Hamilton s collection of early Roman sculpture. And, its all right there in the Hermitage today.
Traveling out of town, we visited the splendid — a word you can use frequently in St. Petersburg — Peterhof Palace on the Gulf of Finland, and Pavlovsk, the neoclassical villa built by Tsar Paul and wife after their Grand Tour of Italy and France, and the home of Prince Menshikov outfitted in the Dutch style. The incredible experience of visiting these three important ports — Stockholm, Tallinn and St. Petersburg — and traveling between them by water as would have been done in our centuries of interest, the 17th, 18th and 19th, gave us the sense of the Hanseatic League network and the shared values as seen in the architecture, decorative arts and interiors. America was following in these very footprints when we turned to the Rococo in the 1750s followed by neoclassicism. |
