I recently obtained a photographic Carte de Visite (CDV) for General Mikhail Nikolaevitch Muravyev (1796-1866), someone of great significance to both Thomas Atkinson and his wife Lucy (nee Finley). For it was while visiting the General’s home in St Petersburg in 1847 that Thomas first set eyes on Lucy, who was working as a governess looking after his young daughter Sofia.

General Muravyev was Vice-President of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society at the time and Thomas needed his backing to get permission to travel extensively in Siberia and Central Asia where his aim was to paint the landscapes that were, up until then, barely known in Europe.

Lucy, whose family lived in London, was 29 by the time she met Thomas, who was 18 years her senior. The couple must have been attracted to each other, but Thomas was due to leave the Russian capital on an extended tour to the east. It was not until a year later that he made a westward dash by sledge of almost 2,000 miles back to Moscow in the middle of winter in order to marry Lucy. She too had travelled, from St Petersburg, to meet him. In the intervening year the couple had written more than 60 letters to each other – now sadly lost – in which they no doubt declared their mutual love. The couple were married a few days later, on 18 February 1848, and within days set off together by sledge back to Siberia and the Great Steppe regions where they would travel for the next six years.

It seems more than likely that General Muravyev, in the absence of Lucy’s father, sanctioned the marriage. Indeed, in Moscow Lucy stayed in a grand house connected to the Muravyev family in Tverskoye Street. During their travels in Siberia the couple visited members of the Muravyev family who had been exiled for their part in the Decembrist uprising in 1825, bringing letters and gifts with them from St Petersburg. And doubtless on their return to St Petersburg in 1853 they were reacquainted with the General and his family.

After the Atkinsons returned to England we have little information about Lucy’s connections with her former employer. We know that the couple were visited by various exiles and other Russians in their London home in the four short years before Thomas died in 1861. There are hints – including a note from Sir Francis Galton – that after Thomas died Lucy may have returned to Russia to work for the Muravyevs. Most of her siblings and her mother had already emigrated to Australia, so she had little to hold her in England, except her son Alatau, who emigrated to Hawaii with his wife and baby in 1869. There is a surviving note from Lucy dated December 1869 from a grand hotel in Nice in the south of France, which strongly suggests she was working for a noble family. She cannot be found in the 1871 Census.

She could even have been working for the General’s daughter, Sofia Mikhailovna Muravyeva, who had married in 1856 and had several children, including Pelageia, born in 1865.

As for the CDV for General Muravyev, the photograph was taken in Paris by the famous French photographic company Charlet & Jacotin, which specialised in aristocrats and royals. Presumably it was taken in Paris in or before 1866, the year he died.

But it also has a small imprint in the lower right corner which reads ‘Ferd. Finsterlin, Műnchen’. Finsterlin was a well-known German landscape photographer. Why his mark appears on this CDV is a mystery, although it is known that many Russian aristocrats visited Germany at this time, particularly to visit the spas. Therme Erding near Munich is the largest spa in the world. Whatever the reason, the CDV is a brilliant memento of a man who played an important part in the dramatic love affair between Thomas and Lucy.