A couple in love, hand in hand, sailing on a boat across the gulf of Finland with their eyes on Kronstadt, a fortress city not far from the imperial center St. Petersburg. This painting by the famous German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) received an honorary place in the living room of Tsar Nicholas I and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna’s private cottage. Their cottage and private life was by no means purely “private.” It served as a retreat that created the romantic setting for the monarch’s display of private life.
In 1817, Nicholas I married Alexandra Feodorovna, born as Princess Charlotte of Prussia. Adopting the manner of Western monarchs like the Prussian emperor Frederick William III and their values of domesticity, Nicholas created an image of a bourgeois monarchy that personified immanent rather than transcendent ideals. As a consequence, virtues in the monarch’s private life are an example and to be admired by his subjects. The monarch’s family became a central symbol of moral purity.
In the cottage, Nicholas could recreate the European value of a separate family sphere. As in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Nicholas and Alexandra symbolized an ideal of a marriage that is expressed by romantic love. The Russian emperor was no longer a hero of the battle, but a hero in a romantic tale.