The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck

by Gerald Easter, Mara Vorhees

Overview

A riveting history and maritime adventure about priceless masterpieces originally destined for Catherine the Great.

On October 1771, a merchant ship out of Amsterdam, Vrouw Maria, crashed off the stormy Finnish coast, taking her historic cargo to the depths of the Baltic Sea. The vessel was delivering a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe’s most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Among the lost treasures was The Nursery, an oak-paneled triptych by Leiden fine painter Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s most brilliant student and Holland’s first international superstar artist. Dou’s triptych was long the most beloved and most coveted painting of the Dutch Golden Age, and its loss in the shipwreck was mourned throughout the art world.

Vrouw Maria, meanwhile, became a maritime legend, confounding would-be salvagers for more than two hundred years. In July 1999, a daring Finnish wreck hunter found Vrouw Maria, upright on the sea floor and perfectly preserved. The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure masterfully recounts the fascinating tale of Vrouw Maria—her loss and discovery—weaving together the rise and fall of the artist whose priceless masterpiece was the jewel of the wreckage.

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees bring to vivid life the personalities that drove (and are still driving) this compelling tale, evoking Robert Massie’s depiction of Russian high politics and culture, Simon Schama’s insights into Dutch Golden Age art and art history, Gary Kinder’s spirit of, danger and adventure on the beguiling Archipelago Sea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643135564
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,109,211
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Gerald Easter is a Professor at Boston College who has been teaching and writing about Russian/East European politics and history for more than two decades. He is the author of The Tsarina's Lost Treasure, written with Mara Vorhees.

Mara Vorhees is a travel writer with an expertise in Russia, New England, and Central America. She has written or contributed to more than forty guidebook editions, published by Lonely Planet. She is the author of The Tsarina's Lost Treasure, written with Gerald Easter.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Wreck ix

Part 1 1

1 Rembrandt's Apprentice 3

2 The Prince's Bride 16

3 From Pupil to Master 28

4 From Fräulcin to Empress 46

5 Temple of Arcs 61

6 The Tsarina's Salon 78

7 Sale of the Century 96

8 Catherine's Treasure Ship Lost 112

Part 2 127

9 Age of Revolution 129

10 Graveyard of Wrecks 145

11 The Wreck Hunter 162

12 Golden Age Secrets Revealed 177

13 Restoring a Master 193

14 Catherine's Treasure Ship Found 206

Part 3 227

15 Finders Keepers 229

16 The Dutch Retreat 247

17 The Swedish Patron 258

18 The Russian Advance 272

19 The Finnish Plan 289

20 Catherine's Treasure Ship Abandoned 304

Epilogue: The Treasure 321

Glossary 327

Note on Currencies 329

Endnotes 331

Bibliography 345

Acknowledgments 353

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

07/13/2020

In this wide-ranging and meticulously researched history, Russia scholar Easter (Capital, Coercion and Post-Communist States) and travel writer Vorhees recount the story of the Vrouw Maria, a Dutch merchant ship carrying more than a dozen paintings to Russian empress Catherine the Great that sank off the coast of Finland, in the Archipelago Sea, in 1771. Among the cargo was the most “coveted artwork produced during the Dutch Golden Age”: the oak-panel triptych The Nursery by Gerrit Dou. Easter and Vorhees recount the career of Dou, a student of Rembrandt’s who eclipsed his teacher in popularity and success during his lifetime. They also sketch Catherine’s rise to the Russian throne; note other famous wrecks discovered in this area; and document years of legal, bureaucratic, and diplomatic wrangling after the Vrouw Maria was discovered in June 1999. Currently, the Finnish National Board of Antiquities, pursuing a model of “in situ preservation,” has no plans to raise the ship or determine the condition of its cargo. Easter and Vorhees braid the various threads of the story into a coherent whole and make a persuasive case for attempting to salvage the ship and its “incomparable cultural relics.” Readers will covet this intriguing portrait of an art world mystery. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

What defines a treasure, and who controls its fate? Easter and Vorhees expertly weave the story of the ship and the painting into history. They plumb the two decades of drama that followed The Nursery’s rediscovery to combine important questions about the value of art and culture and the meaning of hertitage and to create an entertaining tale."

Booklist - Sara Jorgensen

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees skillfully weave the shipwreck of the Vrouw Maria and its secret cargo with the lives of Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Dou and Russia’s art-loving Catherine the Great. The high stakes search for the tsarina’s lost treasure, 18th century and modern, reads like a detective story. A true delight for fans of art, mystery, and maritime archeology.

Susan Jaques

"As the ‘Sea Hunters,’ we had seen wrecks as scattered fragments on coral reefs, as steel structures torn apart by storms and battles in deep water, as rusted, collapsed hulks, and as exquisitely preserved time capsules. We’d found ships with profound historical and cultural connections. . . . Others were filled with cargo of exceptional value to science or archaeology—or had actual treasure. But until Vrouw Maria, we had never seen a ship that had all of that. Lost art masterpieces? A wreck found thanks to dedicated archival research and focused ocean surveys? A wreck discovered incredibly intact, nestled between a shoal of rocks as sharp as dragon’s teeth? This was a wreck that should have been in a Clive Cussler novel."

James P. Delgado

2020-06-17
The story of a 1771 shipwreck off the coast of Finland that contained Dutch masterpieces bound for Catherine the Great.

Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) was one of the most prominent artists of the Dutch golden age. An apprentice to Rembrandt, he eventually surpassed his teacher in fame and wealth. Over the centuries, however, Dou’s reputation has shifted repeatedly with the tides of fashion in the arts. His story makes up one strand of this mostly engaging new book by Easter and Vorhees. Another is the tale of Catherine the Great, who, during her reign, became a prominent art collector, gathering scores of European masterpieces and carting them to St. Petersburg. The authors describe how Catherine acquired Dou’s masterpiece triptych, The Nursery, and engaged a Dutch merchant ship to transport the painting, and many others, to the east. That ship, the Vrouw Maria, sank in the Baltic Sea, carrying Catherine’s paintings down with it. The authors trace the numerous attempts, over the centuries, to find the shipwreck (and the paintings trapped inside) and bring it to the surface. In 1999, a wreck hunter discovered the ship perfectly preserved, but Russian and Finnish officials have disputed the ownership of its contents. While the intriguing narrative contains a fine collection of eccentric characters, the style doesn’t always live up to the appealing subject matter. The authors have an unfortunate penchant for alliteration—e.g., “the apprehensive adolescent,” “stoic soldier,” and “preaching patriarch”—and they occasionally overreach by including too many minor characters, from 17th-century aristocrats to 20th-century Finnish divers. Still, they are largely successful in their synthesis of a massive amount of complicated material, creating an often suspenseful tale that should please the many “treasure hunters, marine archeologists, art historians, financial investors, and adventure-story lovers [who] continue to contemplate the fate of the [ship’s] precious cargo.”

Though weighed down by excessive detail and infelicitous prose, it’s an entertaining yarn whose ending is yet to be written.

Kirkus Reviews

"The Vrouw Maria was initially of no great importance—less than 100 feet in length it was just a two-masted wooden cargo ship. But what a cargo and what a story it harbors. The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure takes this long-lost ship and its priceless cargo, and blends in the story of Dutch art and its competitive owners. And that is just the beginning of the story of Catherine the Great’s lost artworks."

Tony Wheeler