Princess Orloff

Sometimes I just drift off. Last night the endless thunderstorms kept me up and I decided to read a little of the history of Malta, a great crossroad in history.

Now I have to stop and say that after Boldini and Sargent, Valentin Serov is my favorite portrait painter. He, too, was positioned in that amazing transition of history and captured the end of an era with incredible insight.

So many of his portraits fascinate me, including my favorite of Felix Yusupov, but one was of Princess Olga Orloff. Her pose intrigues me since a much less scandalous one of Madame X nearly destroyed Sargent in Paris; but such was the Russian sensuality, a strange mix of Western and Asian feeling. Decadence permeates the scene: the shoulders, a rich fur, the oversized parlor, an outrageous hat, and even the crossed leg. Painted three years before the war that swept her world away, I always wondered what happened to her.

So, while reading about the history of Malta, I came across a section, "Russian Refugees" and immediately opened it. Malta was a British colony and had a fine sense of government and record keeping. In that list of hundreds of Russians rescued by The British government in the spring of 1919 aboard warships was Olga Oroff, traveling on the same battleship, The Marlborough, that The Dowager Empress, Marie, was on.

And that brought me to one of the most striking quotes I ever remember of that period. In April of 1919, Queen Alexandra of England approached her son King George about rescuing her sister, Marie, and the other Romanovs trapped in the Crimean. The king was hesitant because The Romanovs has been so reactionary and his new prime minister wanted nothing to do with them, much less save their lives. The tsar and his family had already been murdered the summer before, and Alexandra knew what was in store; she threw a fit in front of her son, demanding he exercise his royal power and send in that battleship. "Just WHAT do you think, 'H.M.S.' stands for?" she shouted. Hundreds ended up in Malta and safety as a result because it was His Majesty's Ship.