Our Notes & References

Large, attractive lithograph with contemporary hand-colour, here before the letter, showing Russia’s earliest steamboat en route between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt.

Very rare: we couldn’t trace any copies in libraries worldwide, and just one (lettered) at auctions.

“One of the most successful [Scottish entrepreneurs working in Russia at that time]” (NLS), Charles Baird (1766–1843), initially arrived in St. Petersburg in 1786 accompanying Charles Gascoigne, whom Catherine II had commissioned to establish the Aleksandrovsk gun factory at Petrozavodsk. By 1792 Baird had founded his own successful business, the Baird Works, specialising in steam-powered machinery. His firm soon became synonymous with efficiency: contemporaries used the phrase “just like at Baird’s factory” to describe anything running smoothly (NLS).

The Baird Works went on to construct Russia’s first steamship, here finely and impressively represented. In November 1815 it completed its first voyage from St. Petersburg to Kronstadt and back, marking “the beginning of the era of steam navigation in Russia” (Chernenko, our translation here and below). This placed it among the earliest steamships in the world to undertake regular sea voyages, following only George Dodd’s Glasgow–London journey of 1815 (sometimes dated 1816). From 1816 to 1858, a regular steamship service between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt operated for passengers, mail and towing, later under the management of Baird’s son, Francis.

A privilege granted to Baird for the use of steam vessels, published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1818, includes a detailed description and drawings of his steamboat, accompanied by Baird’s note that he intended to continue refining the design. The drawings show an early version of the present boat with uncovered paddle wheels; protective casings appear to have been added shortly thereafter.

In his detailed study, Chernenko reproduces two lithographs from 1820 and the 1820s showing Baird’s steamboat closely resembling the present example, already with covered paddle wheels. Another, undated and smaller lithograph shows an exact same image of the steamboat as here, but in a different surrounding, entering the port of Kronstadt. The same image (18 x 26.5 cm), hand-coloured, is held by the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, London), titled “A small Russian Boat” and dated c. 1825; a British flag is visible on a nearby moored ship.

The present hand-coloured lithograph is significantly larger (41.8 x 52.5 cm) and shows a distant line of sailing vessels, with what is likely the port of St. Petersburg to the far left. A helmsman and about a dozen passengers are aboard, apparently crossing the Neva Bay. A very large, billowing Russian flag and a dense plume of smoke rise above the boat, whose red-painted sides are decorated with yellow elements, including musical instruments.

We could find only one other example of this lithograph (at auction a few years ago), with similar dimensions and some hand-colouring; it showed the printed caption “Das St. Petersburger Dampfschiff bei Cronstadt” [“The St. Petersburg Steamboat near Kronstadt”], quite close to the pencil title given to our example. No artist name was printed, nor any printer’s data, the German auction house tentatively attributing to the Düsseldorf publisher Arnz. Our pencil notes give an approximate date of 1835 and the name of the German artist Peter Suhr (1788-1857).

It is worth noting that Baird’s boat is sometimes confused with a boat named Elizaveta. Indeed, later scholarship of Baird’s (anonymous) steamboat was complicated by Thomas Tower’s Memoir of the late Charles Baird, Esq., of. St. Petersburgh, and of his son, Francis Baird, Esq. (1867). Lacking access to the original drawings and apparently unaware of the 1818 privilege, Tower illustrated a markedly different vessel and named it Elizaveta (or Elisabeth), supposedly in honour of the Queen. No such name, however, appears in archival sources or the contemporary press (Chernenko).

Bibliography

Chernenko V. A. “Parokhod Berda – pervyi v Rossii” // Sbornik Gangut, vyp. 38, 2006.