The Royal Silver Room, September 1997

The Danish Princess Dagmar, who became the Russian Empress Maria Feodorovna. was in many ways 
a noteworthy figure among royal European women. She was only one of many leading Russian 
empresses since Catherine the Great, but it is she who stands out most clearly. She was Empress 
of Russia for 36 years, leaving a reputation that only few others have enjoyed. She must have been 
an exceptional person: no one who wrote memoirs of the enormous Russian court had anything but 
good to say about the Empress.
It is of no consequence whether the Empress Maria Feodorovna had great intellectual gifts or not: she 
was wise. It is true that she was born a Danish princess and throughout her life retained a profound 
love of her fatherland, but she became Russian. She learned the language, and she shared her husband's 
and her contemporaries' view of Russian society. She exerted her indisputable political influence through
quiet, carefully considered pressure, later slightly more noticeably exerted on her son Nicholas II.
The exhibition and the many articles and descriptions in the catalogue were in part built up as a 
biographical sketch of the Empress Maria Feodorovna. They are based mainly on previously unknown 
source materials. The many subjects that are taken up for discussion or touched upon actually only serve 
to whet our appetite, preparing the way for more in-depth studies in highly diverse fields related to the 
Empress, her family, the his¬tory of the Russian Imperial court and its relations over the years to other 
European princely courts. It is to be hoped that the exhibition and catalogue will help re¬inforce existing 
international scholarship, on the one hand, and initiate European scholarship in hitherto untouched areas, 
on the other.