page_title: Private Apartments of the Winter Palace
section_title: Apartments of Alexander II and Tsaritsa Maria Alexandrovna
hierarchical_section_title: Private Apartments of the Winter Palace / Apartments of Alexander II and Tsaritsa Maria Alexandrovna
caption_attribution_description: Memorial to Tsar Alexander II, photographed by User:Giano April 2015. The sculpture is dated 1881 by the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. The Museum does not name the artist on that link but indicates 1838-1916 in the author field. It appears the artist is Matthew Chizhov (1838-1916) as this indicates he sculpted a bust of Alexander II in 1881; the State Museum states Chizhov's work is included in the Collections.
context_page_description: The Private Apartments of the Winter Palace are sited on the piano nobile of the western wing of the former imperial palace, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Access to the private rooms, for members of the Imperial Family, from the exterior was usually through the Saltykov Entrance which was reserved for use by only the Tsar, Tsaritsa and grand dukes and grand duchesses. A second access was through a discrete box-like porch, on the western end of the Palace's Neva façade. From the ground floor, it can be accessed from the October Staircase, formerly known as His Majesty's Own Staircase; this double-flighted imperial staircase was a secondary entrance to the private apartments, and provided a more convenient route to the palace's ground floor and private entrances than the more formal and ceremonial public route through the state apartments. During the October Revolution of 1917, this was the entrance by which the revolutionaries gained access to the palace in order to arrest the Provisional Government in the small private dining room. Since that date it has been known as the October Staircase and has a plaque commemorating the event.
context_section_description: This suite of rooms is at the centre and southern end of the private wing, overlooking the Admiralty and Palace Square. In the apartment of the Tsaritsa, originally rebuilt by Brullov, the hand of Andrei Stakenschneider is evident. His chief distinction was an ability to combine an eclectic mix of architectural styles, frequently combining Classical, Gothic and Oriental motifs in the same scheme. This is nowhere more obvious that in the suite created for Tsaritsa Maria Alexandrovna, where the Gold Drawing Room combines all of these motifs. Maria Alexandrovna used the Gold Drawing room as her state Drawing Room with her more private rooms beyond: the Crimson Drawing Room followed by her Boudoir, before the most private of her rooms, the bedroom. Her study, in a corner of the palace, by contrast with the preceding Gold Drawing Room was simply decorated having plain white walls adorned only with gilded sconces, and a vaulted ceiling broken onto palales by gilded moulding. By contrast again, the small boudoir beyond was in an ornate rococo revival style created by the architect Harald Bosse in 1853.
caption: Memorial bust to Alexander II placed on the spot where he died in 1881.
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