A full-length study of the dress worn by Grand Duchess Maria for her marriage to Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh; with a detail of the agraffe and star; dated and inscribed in pencil: Silver Saraphan of H.I.H the Duchess of Edinburgh 23/1/74; with other notes. One of several studies for the painting of the marriage in the Imperial Chapel in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg; RCIN 404476. See also RCIN 926235, 926238.

Chevalier’s sketch accurately describes the silver and gem-set sarafan worn by all Russian imperial brides for their wedding, with its draped sleeves lined with ermine, together with the traditional kokoshnik headdress. Lady Augusta Stanley’s letters provide a vivid and detailed account of the wedding ceremony; she recalls how ’six gentlemen I think carried the long white cloth-of-silver train and the Mantel trimmed with ermine’. Maria’s remarkable jewels are indicated in Chevalier’s sketch, both on the cloth of embroidered silver of the dress and mantle, and in the details that the artist has picked out at the top of the sheet, as reminders of the agaffe – the metal and gem-set fastening of the mantle – and the Order of St Catherine, the broad riband of which Chevalier has represented in pale pink, providing the only colour to an otherwise monochromatic sketch. Lady Stanley recalls that ‘the small graceful head so childlike, must have ached with the immense weight of jewels, the necklace of diamonds […] the most beautiful I ever saw, and the gown was studded with them round the body and sleeves and down the front of the body and skirt’.

Text adapted from Russia, Royalty & the Romanovs, London, 2018