Sculpture "Carpenter King"
St. Petersburg, nab. Admiralty, 6
Description:
The bronze sculpture of Peter I, commonly known as the “Tsar Carpenter”, became a gift to St. Petersburg by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was installed in front of the Eastern Pavilion of the Admiralty in 1996 for the 300th anniversary of the Russian Navy.
Giving sculpture has a background in which it is not surprising to get confused. For the 200th anniversary of St. Petersburg, Nicholas II ordered the casting of two genre figures of Peter in bronze as a gift to the city. The author of “Peter saving fishermen near Lakhta” and “Petra-carpenter” Leopold Bernstam was considered the favorite master of Nikolai Alexandrovich.
These monuments were erected in 1909-1910, and a year later, Saardam, the city where the Russian tsar mastered shipbuilding, Nicholas II was presented with a duplicate of the Tsar-Carpenter. The bronze statues in Petrograd did not please the Bolsheviks and were dismantled in 1919. A hundred years after its first appearance in the city on the Neva, the Tsar-Carpenter, thanks to the already Dutch copy, again took an honorable place on the Admiralty embankment.