His four allegorical bronzes for the Elisseeff department store in St. Petersburg (for architect Gavriil Baranovsky), and the French-style caryatids and finial figures for the Singer House (for architect Pavel Suzor) are major components of the "Russian Art Nouveau" visible along Nevsky Prospekt.
In the 16th century, from the examples engraved for Sebastiano Serlio's treatise on architecture, caryatids became a fixture in the decorative vocabulary of Northern Mannerism expressed by the Fontainebleau School and the engravers of designs in Antwerp.
It was eventually bought for £294,009 (including an £108,000 Art Fund grant and other money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the British Museum Friends and the Caryatids of the Greek and Roman Department) - this would have been higher had it gone onto the open market and through the usual sales processes, or if the Museum had not been able to respond as rapidly as it could due to the Nicopolis discovery.
Hardwick altered the design to create a suitably grand facade, with a Corinthian portico six columns wide, based on that of the Pantheon in Rome, and a steeple, its top stage in the form of a miniature temple, surrounded by eight caryatids.