In July 1749, when Ivan was visiting his brother-in-law Prince Galitzine at his country estate near Moscow, the Shuvalov brothers arranged his meeting with the Empress, who was making a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sabbas.

The Shuvalovs were not disappointed in their calculations: the 40-year-old Empress took notice of the handsome page, who was 18 years her junior, and bid him accompany her in the upcoming pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem Monastery.

As his biographers like to point out, Shuvalov was "mild and generous to all" and "had no enemies whatsoever".His position at court grew stronger during Elizabeth's declining years, when he served as a virtual master of petitions to her, eclipsing her previous favourite and rumoured husband, Aleksey Razumovsky.

Unlike the self-seeking favourites of Catherine the Great, Shuvalov determined to put his good fortune to constructive use for the advancement of education and the promotion of fine arts in his country.

On 23 January 1755 – the name-day of Shuvalov's mother Tatiana Rodionovna – the Empress endorsed their project to set up the Imperial Moscow University "for all sorts and conditions of people".

At first no formal examination was required to enter the Academy; even peasants' children – like Fyodor Rokotov and Fedot Shubin – were admitted on Shuvalov's personal recommendation.

On Catherine II's request, he would go on diplomatic errands; thus it was he who persuaded Pope Pius VI to replace Durini, a Russophobic nuncio at Warsaw, with the more pliant Count Giuseppe Garampi.

Shuvalov's mansion was to be frequented by the new generation of Russian intellectuals: Ekaterina Dashkova, Denis Fonvizin, Mikhail Kheraskov, Ivan Dmitriev, and Aleksandr Shishkov – many of them products of the university he had established.