Monplaisir Palace

The palace is arranged as a central pavilion linked to two side pleasure pavilions by covered galleries, all set against a retaining wall at the waterline. The central block rises under a high Dutch-style broken roof capped with a wooden decorative vase. The side pavilions are topped by small roof lanterns. Long connecting galleries open at ground level with large glazed arcades and are fitted with small-pane, Dutch-style windows; each gallery measures twenty-two metres and has a floor set in a checkerboard of white and black marble.

Exterior walls were built from a narrow, small-format brick laid with exposed joints that were picked out in whitewash. The sea promenade and terrace directly in front of the palace are surfaced with red clinker bricks, forming the palace’s southern approach to the Gulf of Finland.

Inside, the main reception room retains extensive oak wall panelling into which twenty-two paintings are set in black lacquer frames drawn from Peter’s collection. The east side of the principal hall displays three marine scenes by the Amsterdam painter Adam Silo. The painted ceiling in this hall shows Apollo, figures from the Italian comic theatre known as Commedia dell’arte, and the faces of the four winds. At the corners where the ceiling meets the walls stand sculpted alabaster herms representing the seasons.

A sequence of service and private rooms survives in restored form. The kitchen, the buffet room, a bedroom, and the secretary’s chamber are presented with period fittings. The Sea Cabinet is lined with oak and faced with faience tiles that illustrate thirteen different types of sailing vessels; its windows look out directly over the Gulf of Finland.

The lacquered Chinese cabinet, finished as an exotic decorative room in the early 1720s, originally displayed a large collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain gathered by Peter I, some 546 items in total, of which approximately 150 survived later losses. Eleven large vertical lacquer panels with scenes of Chinese daily life and eleven smaller panels showing birds, dragons, and cranes once covered its walls; these panels were painted between 1719 and 1722 by Russian icon painters working under a Dutch master. Much of this decoration was destroyed during the wartime occupation and was repainted from surviving fragments by Palekh masters between 1953 and 1963. Ceiling paintings in the connecting galleries, completed around 1718 by painters attached to the Moscow armoury workshop from designs supplied by a French decorator, remain part of the decorative scheme.