The commemorative medal “Monument to Queen Louise” perpetuated the date of the meeting between Queen Louise of Prussia and Napoleon before the negotiations that went down in history as the Peace of Tilsit. The obverse of the medal depicts the restored monument to the Queen, one of the most important landmarks of Sovetsk. The creator of the original monument in Jacobsruhe Park was Gustav Eberlein, a famous German sculptor and representative of the Berlin sculpture school. The monument, made of white Carrara marble, was unveiled on September 22, 1900, in the presence of German Emperor William II and the sculptor himself.
The sculptor depicted the queen full-length, dressed in an empire-style outfit and an ermine fur royal mantle with elaborate draperies. Her head is crowned with a diadem, tied with a light scarf in the fashion of the early 19th century. She holds a bouquet of her favorite cornflowers. The Queen Louise Monument is academic in style. The tiered pedestal is decorated with festoons and the classic “wavy” ornamental motif. The original monument was lost after World War II. Only in 2014, as part of the Lithuanian-Polish-Russian cross-border cooperation project of the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI), the monument to Queen Louise was recreated and took its historical place in Jacobsruhe Park. The city of Sovetsk took part in the Russian-Lithuanian project “Building the tourist route From the Tilsit Peace Treaty of 1807 to the Convention of Tauroggen in 1812.”
The sculpture of Queen Louise
was the work of Pavel Ignatiev and Denis Prasolov, restorers of the “Nasledie”
studio in St. Petersburg. Since plaster models of the German sculpture did not
survive, the experts had to fully recreate the figure, relying solely on
historical photographs and postcards. The pedestal of the monument made of
natural marble was ordered in France. The grand opening of the new monument in
the city park took place on July 6, 2014, as part of the celebration of the
207th anniversary of the signing of the Peace of Tilsit. A commemorative medal
was issued in honor of this event.
