In the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg there hang portraits of over 300 high-ranking officers who fought in the Russian army in the campaign of 1812, after the invasion of Russia by Napoleon's Grande Armée, and in the European campaigns of 1813–14, which ended with Napoleon's defeat. The portraits were painted by the English artist George Dawe, who was engaged on this task, with help from two Russian artists, from 1822 until shortly before his death in 1829. Many of the great Russian noble families (the Golitsyns, Naryshkins, Shcherbatovs, Shuvalovs, Stroganovs, Volkonskiis and Vorontsovs, for example) are represented in this collection, as well as some of the most notable heroes of the war, such as the commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, Denis Davydov, Aleksei Ermolov and Nikolai Raevskii. However, many of the officers painted by Dawe were of non-Russian origin, as their surnames suggest. A few of these had recently come over to the Russian side, such as de Langeron, a French royalist who entered Russian service after the French Revolution, von Bennigsen and von Wintzingerode, natives of Brunswick and Hesse respectively, and the Dutch nobleman van Serooskerken. Others belonged to families who had only recently settled in Russia or found themselves in territory conquered or annexed by Russia in the eighteenth century. There was a Melissino, who had Greek forebears, and a de Witt, the son of a Polish-Lithuanian general. Above all, there were members of noble families from the Baltic regions of Courland, Estland and Liefland (or Livonia). These Baltic noblemen included members of the Berg family, a Bistrom, a von Jürgensburg, von Knorrings, von der Pahlens, Rozens, a von Sass and a von Staden. Not that the families of foreign origin who are represented in the gallery of the Winter Palace supplied the Russian emperor only with military personnel. Members of some of those families, such as the Korfs and von Lievens, also occupied high office in the civilian administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. General Alexander von Benckendorff, after a distinguished military career, would become the first head of the Third Section, the secret police established by Nicholas I in 1826. In the Alexandrine age, then, towards the end of the period encompassed by the two volumes we are introducing here, Russia was an empire with a multi-ethnic European elite.