Auguste Cadolle. The Kremlin Garden

Auguste Cadolle's watercolour of 1829 is devoted to the Kremlin Garden, the original name of the gardens along the Kremlin wall that are known today as the Alexander Garden. They were laid out in 1819–1823 to a design by the architect Osip Bove, when Moscow was being rebuilt after the fire of 1812: the Neglinnaya River was enclosed in a pipe three kilometres long, and the gardens were created on the freed land. They were renamed the Alexander Gardens after the coronation of Alexander II in 1856.

Auguste Cadolle (1782–1849) was a French painter and lithographer who worked in Moscow for a long time. According to some accounts, he served as a cavalry officer in Napoleon's army and took part in the campaign of 1812. Cadolle painted views of Moscow, made lithographs of them himself, and in 1824–1835 sent some of his works to the Paris Salon.

The watercolour is executed on paper with the watermark "I Whatman 1827". In Russian, high-grade white paper is still called "vatman": it was first made in England in the mid-1750s by the papermaker James Whatman.