The story
In the Russian rooms at Hillwood, in Washington, D.C., hangs A Boyar Wedding Feast, painted in 1883 by Konstantin Makovsky, a fashionable Russian salon painter. It shows a 17th-century Moscow wedding, the guests raising their cups to the newlyweds. It won a gold medal at the 1885 world's fair in Antwerp, passed through American hands, and at one point belonged to Robert Ripley, creator of Ripley's Believe It or Not!, before Marjorie Merriweather Post bought it.
Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune, bought Hillwood in 1955 and remodelled its Georgian-style house as a home that could also show her collection. Her taste for Russian imperial art took shape in Moscow in the late 1930s, when her husband Joseph Davies was the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, and she went on collecting for decades. The house holds two Fabergé Imperial Easter eggs, among them the Twelve Monograms Egg, along with icons, porcelain, chalices and a full-length portrait of Catherine the Great.
Her French taste is here too, in 18th-century furniture and Sèvres porcelain, and in paintings such as Night by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a floating allegorical figure shown at the Paris Salon of 1883. Post left the estate to become a museum, and it opened in 1977. Outside, among the gardens, is a Japanese garden laid out in 1957 by the landscape architect Shogo Myaida.
