A sculptor, a Soviet, and a Silver Ghost: a Russian Rolls-Royce surrounded by rumours

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Although the information accompanying this picture seemed quite plentiful at first, we couldn’t find out too much about it in the end. The original caption reads “Marinashky and the Ministerial Rolls-Royce”, and the picture was taken by Clare Sheridan in 1921. She was a prolific British sculptor who made busts for the rich and famous and soon travelled the world to do her work, writing books and journals about her journeys as well.

And what an interesting character she was! Sheridan made friends not only in high places but in rare ones, too. One of them was Lev Kamenev, the Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician who came to London in 1920 as part of the first Soviet trade delegation. She modelled a bust of him and later wrote:

“We went on foot off a side road onto a rough sandy track, quite away from people and lights. On a bank I spread my white fur coat, and we sat there for an hour or more. It was very beautiful.”

It seems that the British artist made such an impression on Kamenev that, in the summer of 1920, she was invited to travel to Russia to make busts of other notable revolutionaries, staying in the Kremlin for two months and modelling the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky and—again—Kamenev. It is widely believed that the two had a secret relationship, which caused some marital problems with Mrs Kamenev. And then Sheridan supposedly had a fling with Trotsky, too. Clare’s uncle—Winston Churchill, no less—is said to have been furious about her Russian activities, and “after finding herself widely shunned in polite society due to her support of Bolshevism, she moved to America.”

We get carried away easily in upper-echelon society here. So, back to the car. A Silver Ghost, surely? And if it was a ministerial car, some of you will surely know more about it. Didn’t Lenin have one? Oh—we’ve seen other Russian Rolls-Royces here—remember this one? Or how about this one? You cracked those two nuts quickly. How about this one, then?

Words: Jeroen Booij
Picture: The Public Domain Image Archive

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