The Curious Journey of the Ipatiev House Chandelier
by Greg King
In September 2018, an exhibition called The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution opened at the Science Museum in London. It included a number of unique objects: Nicholas II’s jewel album; letters from the Imperial Family; the Red Cross and Steel Military Faberge Eggs given by the Emperor to Empress Alexandra; a medical notebook kept by Dr. Eugene Botkin; and many portraits and photographs. One of the display rooms focused on the murder of the Imperial Family and White Army Investigator Nicholas Sokolov’s subsequent search for their remains. Included in the glass cases were a few of the items discovered at the Four Brothers Mine outside of Ekaterinburg, including one of Alexandra’s pearl earrings; her emerald and diamond cross; and Dr. Botkin’s upper plate of dentures.1
One case held an especially intriguing object. This was a chandelier whose original bronze finish had taken on a greenish patina of age. Stylized flowers and leaves of green and gold curved around three Murano glass tulips of white and pink holding electric bulbs. Its shape and form carried a vaguely art nouveau style, a delicate piece of careful workmanship. But this chandelier evoked not wonder at its craft and form, but rather tragedy: it had once hung in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Beneath its three lights, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia Nikolaievna had dressed at two on the morning of July 17, 1918, anticipating being moved by the Ural Regional Soviet to another location safe from the approaching White Army and Czech Legions. They did not know that, within an hour and in the room directly below their feet, they would be ruthlessly shot, stabbed, and beaten to death along with their parents, brother, and the four retainers who had remained imprisoned with them.
The chandelier has a tangled history. I’ve been lucky enough to see it up close and even touch. In the spring of 1989, I visited George Gibbes, adopted son of Imperial tutor Charles Sidney Gibbes, in Oxford. It was here that his father had displayed the rescued chandelier, in a small chapel. At that time, the fixture – along with photo albums, diaries, letters, watercolors, and other Imperial relics – was being readied for transfer to Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. In 1990, I saw it on display in a new chapel at Luton Hoo, and then again in 1996, when I went to the house on a closed day to look through the photo albums Gibbes had left and personally examine other items they had in their possession.
How this delicate chandelier made its way from Ekaterinburg to Oxford and then to Bedfordshire is an astonishing story.
In 1908, engineer Nicholas Ipatiev purchased an elaborate mansion that stood on Voznesensky Prospekt in Ekaterinburg. The house had been built by its previous owner, Ivan Redikortsev, some twenty years earlier, in an exaggerated Russian Empire style, with ornate stone exterior ornaments, gently arched windows, and two scrolled gables set with dormers looking out onto the avenue. In April 1918, the Ural Regional Soviet had commandeered the house and ordered Ipatiev to vacate the premises. A few days later, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their daughter Marie Nikolaievna, and a handful of retainers arrived from Tobolsk and were imprisoned within its walls. A month would pass before the remaining children joined their parents in the ominously rechristened House of Special Purpose.
The Romanovs spent seventy-eight days imprisoned here, the façade of the house shielded by two crude wooden palisades ringed with sentry posts manned by armed Bolshevik guards. Ironically, the Ipatiev House was more lavish than the Governor’s House in which they had lived at Tobolsk. The Ekaterinburg mansion sported silk brocade on the walls, parquet floors, painted ceilings, and Ipatiev’s luxurious furniture and fittings.
Three rooms stretched along the southern side of the main floor. At the western end was a bedroom, which originally was used by Tsesarevich Alexei and then maid Anna Demidova. From the dining room, double doors opened to the main suite. This consisted of a large room, used by Maria Feodorovna Ipatieva as a boudoir, which in turn led to the principal bedroom, set at the southeastern corner.2 Nicholas and Alexandra, and later Alexei, slept in this southeastern room, while the four Grand Duchesses were installed in the former boudoir.
Maria Ipatieva had chosen the furnishings and decorative details for her boudoir. Some items were likely purchased in her native St. Petersburg during trips to the capital; we don’t have records, but it may have been here that she first saw and was taken with the Murano glass and bronze chandelier which she took back to Ekaterinburg.3
On August 2, 1918, after the White Army captured Ekaterinburg, an investigator carefully inventoried the empty Ipatiev House. He left the most detailed description of Maria Ipatieva’s former boudoir, the room used as a bedroom by the Grand Duchesses. The flooring was of brown and beige linoleum in a checkerboard pattern, and the walls were covered in a dark silk patterned with pink and green floral designs, topped by a frieze of green and gold flowers. Two porcelain stoves stood in the northern corners of the room, flanking the doors to the dining room. A single tall, arched window was opposite the entry doors. On the sill, the investigator found a small jar with one piece of candy; a short black hairpin; two padlocks; and a brown vial with some kind of liquid. A dressing table, a large cheval mirror, and a white porcelain chamber pot stood in one corner. On the western side of the room was a metal screen holding a panel woven with a bird against a light green background. There were three side chairs and two armchairs of carved black wood and upholstered in dark red plush, with linen embroidery; and a wooden flower stand holding a half-burned wax candle. A table held a green leather box decorated with floral paintings and containing some pearl buttons and safety pins; an icon of the Feodorovsky Mother of God whose diamond encrusted crown had been torn off; and a New Testament. Three books lay atop another black wooden flower stand: volume I of War and Peace; the Bible; and The Great in the Small and the Coming of the Antichrist, containing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Sergei Nilus. Although the Grand Duchesses had brought their camp beds from Tobolsk, the Bolsheviks had removed them from the house after the murders – indeed, all of the beds in the house had been taken away. Above, from a ceiling painted pale pink, hung a bronze and glass chandelier with three electric lights concealed by glass shades in the shape of tulips.4
Charles Sidney Gibbes, English tutor to the Imperial children, had followed the family into their Siberian exile. He had lived with them in the Governor’s House at Tobolsk and had been among the retainers who accompanied Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, and Anatasia Nikolaievna and Tsesarevich Alexei to Ekaterinburg. The Ural Regional Soviet had denied him entrance to the Ipatiev House – a decision that probably saved his life.
Once the Bolsheviks were forced to flee Ekaterinburg, Gibbes returned to the city. Over the next year, he assisted the White Army investigation into the Imperial Family’s disappearance and presumed murder, identifying objects discovered at the Four Brothers Mine as having belonged to the Romanovs. He also made many visits to the Ipatiev House, wandering through the mansion. As he did so, Gibbes freely picked up numerous objects: a pair of the Emperor’s felt boots; some exercise books used by Maria and Anastasia Nikolaievna; some icons that had belonged to the Imperial Family; some discarded bloody bandages used on Tsesarevich Alexei; and a letter that Alexei had written to Kolya Derevenko, son of Imperial physician Dr. Vladimir Derevenko.5
As the Civil War progressed, and the Bolsheviks began marching toward Ekaterinburg, the White Army fled. Before leaving the city, General Michael Deterikhs removed the bronze and glass chandelier from the Ipatiev House. Although the White Army had set up headquarters in the house, it – and its furnishings and fittings – still belonged to Nicholas Ipatiev. We do not know if Deterikhs asked Ipatiev if the tutor could take the chandelier, but take it he did, packing it in one of the numerous boxes brought with him when he left Ekaterinburg for Omsk.6
For a time, Gibbes worked in Omsk for Sir Charles Eliot, the British High Commissioner in Siberia.7 It was in Omsk that Gibbes met Deterikhs. The general had some seventy cases of Imperial artifacts, including the chandelier, which he wanted to get out of Russia. At some point, Gibbes was given a few of these cases to transport under the protection of the British High Commission. This Gibbes did, moving across Siberia, temporarily living in Harbin, and finally returning to England with his collection of relics.8
In 1934, Gibbes was received into the Orthodox Church, taking the baptismal name of Alexei after the Tsesarevich. But he was not content to merely join his new faith: Gibbes spent the next few years as first a monk, then a deacon, a priest and, finally in 1935, an Abbot. He took a new name, Father Nicholas, in honor of the late Emperor, and served as a parish priest in London for several years.9
Gibbes moved to Oxford in 1941, and eight years later bought three terraced houses in Marston Street just off Cowley Road. In one he set up a small museum dedicated to the Romanovs. Here he kept some of the relics he had brought out of Siberia, including watercolors painted by the Grand Duchesses; an icon signed by Alexandra and given to him; a pencil case that had belonged to Tsesarevich Alexei; Marie and Anastasia’s exercise books; and numerous photographs. This was not the only reminder of Imperial Russia. In another part of the same building, Gibbes established the Chapel of St. Nicholas.10
Here Gibbes regularly held services that always included prayers for the Imperial Family. But the Romanovs were not merely commemorated in prayers. The Emperor’s felt boots stood near the altar; some icons that had belonged to the Imperial Family hung on the walls. And, above the altar, hung the bronze and glass chandelier from the Ipatiev House, a poignant reminder of the last days of the Imperial Family.11
Gibbes died on March 24, 1963. His adopted son George took over as warden of St. Nicholas House and Chapel. By 1989, when I visited George Gibbes, the chapel had been dismantled. All of the former tutor’s Imperial relics were to be sent to Luton Hoo. This was done later that year. George Gibbes died in 1993.
Luton Hoo may, at first, have seemed an odd destination for the possessions of Charles Sidney Gibbes. A lavish country house in Bedfordshire, it had been rebuilt in the Eighteenth Century under the direction of famed architect Robert Adam for the Earl of Bute. In 1830, the Earl’s grandson inherited the house and commissioned architect Robert Smirke to undertake extensive remodeling, which eliminated much of the original design. After a devastating fire in 1843, the house was sold to a Liverpool lawyer, who restored most of Smirke’s work.
In 1903 wealthy diamond magnate Sir Julius Wernher brought the house. A royal intimate, he wanted an estate suitably grand to his lavish style of life and entertaining and commissioned the architectural firm of Charles Mewes and Arthur Davis to transform the mansion. The pair specialized in just the sort of interiors that appealed to the nouveaux riche: marble walls, gilded boiseries, and sweeping staircases. They had designed not only the Ritz Hotel in London but would also work on the interiors of the great ocean liners of the era. When completed, Luton Hoo was indeed a regal mansion, a lavish backdrop for the collection of Wernher art and objects which was said to have rivaled that of the Rothschilds at nearby Waddesdon Manor.
Still, why this house as a destination for Imperial relics? There was indeed a Russian connection. On July 20, 1917, Wernher’s son Harold had married Countess Anastasia de Torby, daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich and his morganatic wife Sophie, granddaughter of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The impetuous Grand Duke had married Sophie in 1891, against his family’s wishes and in a move which incurred the wrath of his cousin Emperor Alexander III. Condemned to a life of exile, the couple eventually settled in England where they raised their three children. When Harold inherited Luton Hoo, Anastasia, known as Zia, brought with her an impressive collection of objects, including a number of pieces created by jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé.
Lady Zia died in 1977, and her granddaughter Lucy Phillips opened the house for tours. At one end of the mansion, she created the Orthodox Chapel of St. Nicholas, which was consecrated in 1991 in the presence of the late Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich. The chapel and its adjoining rooms were filled with a collection of Romanov and Russian treasures: icons, paintings, court gowns from the de Stoeckl family, and some of the relics Gibbes had brought back from Ekaterinburg. And here the chandelier from the Ipatiev House found a new home.
Although the house was sold in 1991, the Phillips family kept a series of apartments and the Gibbes collection remained on display. But in 2007 Luton Hoo was converted into a luxury hotel, and the former chapel was dismantled. Many of the house’s treasures were sold, while some were put on display at the Ranger’s House in Greenwich. The family, though, kept some of the more precious items, including the Ipatiev House chandelier. In 2018, it was Zia’s daughter, the late Lady Myra Butter, who lent the chandelier to the London exhibit. After its display, it was returned to the family, who continue to preserve it as a relic of that fatal night in July 1918 when it cast its glow on four young women about to be murdered.
Source Notes
1. Romanov News, No. 127, October 2018.
2. Shitov, 162.
3. Ibid.
4. Sokolov, 77-78.
5. Welch, 77.
6. Benagh, 267.
7. Welch, 81.
8. Trewin, 121; Benagh, 267.
9. Welch, 95-96.
10. Trewin, 145; Welch, 105; Benagh, 266-69.
11. Benagh, 267.
Bibliography
Benagh, Christine L. An Englishman in the Court of the Tsar: The Spiritual Journey of Charles Sydney Gibbes. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, 2000.
Romanov News, published by Paul Kulikovsky, No. 127, October 2018.
Shitov, Vitalii. Dom Ipatieva, 1877-1977. Ekaterinburg/Chelyabinsk: Avto Graf, 2013.
Sokolov, Nicholas. Ubiistvo︠ t︡sarskoi sem’i. Berlin: Slovo, 1925.
Trewin, J. C. The House of Special Purpose. New York: Stein & Day, 1975.
Welch, Frances. The Romanovs & Mr. Gibbes: The Story of the Englishman Who Taught the Children of the Last Tsar. London: Short Books, 2002.
Hi. Great article as usual. I saw the exhibition at Luton Hoo one wet windy weekend when, I seem to recall, there were only 2 other people there and no one from the House to ask questions of. The chandelier had no written description, it was just the light in the middle of the ceiling, so a lot of people would not have known its history sadly. I contacted the Ranger’s House a couple of times to ask if the Imperial items were going on public display and they told me they had no plans to show them. In a weird connection when I got home from Luton Hoo I realised that apart from the leaves the glass tulip chandelier in my bedroom was almost identical…