The list of foreign architects, engravers, painters and sculptors who made a direct contribution to the development and flowering of the arts in eighteenth-century Russia is a long one. Italians, French and Germans, in perhaps that order of priority, figure prominently down the decades from Peter's reign to Catherine's: Trezzini, Schlüter, Leblond, Rastrelli, Vallin de la Motte, Quarenghi were outstanding architects, each leaving their distinctive mark on the new capital; Rastrelli the Elder, Caravaque, Rotari, Grooth, Tocqué, Falconet and Mme Vigée Lebrun were among the most noted of a generally less imposing list of painters and sculptors. Only the name of architect Charles Cameron, who never worked in the capital itself but at Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, would normally be included so as to acknowledge, as it were, a British presence. British scholars, indeed, would find it difficult to produce other British names, even for a catalogue of the ‘also-known-to have-worked in Russia’ variety, although Tamara Talbot Rice made a valiant attempt in one of her articles to deprive the talented Danish painter Benjamin Pattersen of his birthright by calling him ‘the first in a line of British topographical artists to visit Russia’. Nevertheless, while conceding that Cameron remains in a class of his own, it is possible to extend the British list to more than modest length, particularly if we include, as we should, exponents of landscape gardening, one of the most esteemed arts of the eighteenth century. At least a dozen gardeners, eight painters, three architects, two engravers, a sculptor and a medallist worked in Russia at various times, but predominantly and expectedly, during Catherine's reign.