Qualla: English Palace

English Palace: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. There is a granite staircase in the English Park at Peterhof that leads up to nothing. A Corinthian portico used to stand at the top of it. Behind the portico stretched a precise rectangular palace with an eight-column pediment, white walls, and a granite-clad ground story. Catherine the Great commissioned the building from a young Italian architect named Giacomo Quarenghi in 1781 and lived to see it nearly finished in 1796. It was Quarenghi's first major commission in Russia and the building that established his Palladian neoclassicism as the dominant Petersburg style for the next forty years. In 1942 the Wehrmacht turned it into a forward observation post on the Leningrad front and shelled it heavily. After the war the Soviet government decided not to rebuild and finished the job with dynamite. A monument now stands on the basement foundations.

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

English Palace: Quarenghi's First Russian Job

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yasmapaz & ace_heart, CC BY-SA 2.0. Giacomo Quarenghi arrived in Saint Petersburg in 1779, recommended to Catherine by her agents in Italy. He was thirty-five years old and had spent his apprenticeship studying Andrea Palladio's villas in the Veneto. Catherine wanted a refuge from court life, somewhere she could re...

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Image: yasmapaz & ace_heart | CC BY-SA 2.0

English Palace: The Refuge That Was Not One

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Мейер, Иоганн Якоб (1787—1858), Литограф: Шульц, Карл Карлович (1823—1859), Public domain. Catherine had imagined the English Palace as a quiet retreat. She got little use from it. After her death the throne passed to her son Paul I, who had detested his mother in life and made a point of dismantling her favorite projects in death. Paul converted the English Palace int...

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Image: Мейер, Иоганн Якоб (1787—1858), Литограф: Шульц, Карл Карлович (1823—1859) | Public domain

English Palace: An English Garden Around an English House

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleks G, CC BY-SA 3.0. The garden surrounding the palace was as much a part of Quarenghi's vision as the building itself. Designed in the English landscape style that had taken over European garden taste in the 1770s, it rejected the geometric parterres and clipped hedges of the French baroque traditio...

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Image: Aleks G | CC BY-SA 3.0

English Palace: 1942

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitold Muratov, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the Russian Revolution in 1917 the palace was nationalized and converted into a sanatorium. It functioned in that capacity through the 1920s and 1930s. Then the German army arrived. The Siege of Leningrad began in September 1941 and the front line stabilized just south of t...

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Image: Vitold Muratov | CC BY-SA 4.0

English Palace: What Quarenghi Built Anyway

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GAlexandrova, CC BY-SA 4.0. Even without the English Palace standing, Quarenghi's mark on Saint Petersburg is everywhere. He built the Smolny Institute on the Neva, where the first Russian school for noble girls was established and where Lenin would later run the October Revolution from a borrowed office. H...

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Image: GAlexandrova | CC BY-SA 4.0