Journal Sovfarfor

Porcelain from China and Germany had been known in Russia for centuries due to trade relations with foreign countries and private travel. But porcelain production became possible in Russia only in the 1740s as the result of work done by talented Russian scientist Dmitry Vinogradov, who discovered the secret of porcelain production and began its industrial manufacture.

Some words about history of Russian and Soviet porcelain.

Francis Gardner, an English timber merchant, settled in Russia in 1746 and, after twenty years in the timber trade, founded, on March 7, 1766, Russia’s first privately owned porcelain factory near the village of Verbilki, the Dmitrov uezd, Moscow gubernia.

Archives and surviving porcelain samples give a full case-history of the earliest Russian porcelain undertaking.

Boris Kustodiev is the Russian artist, who devoted his art to homeland.

He was born in Astrakhan, therefore he liked provincial towns on Volga with theirs narrow streets that were smothered in greenery, with white churches, gold and blue cupolas, rich merchant cottages, pretty-bourgeois small houses, with flowers on the windows, municipal gardens, where nobility and town dwellers spent time.

Kustodiev became artistic education in the Academy of arts in Petersburg. I. Repin was his teacher. Kustodiev appreciated oeuvre of his mentor, his attitude to art.

The Petersburg Faberge firm famous for its exquisite masterpieces, ranks with the finest Russian jewellery firms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Faberge’s ancestors left France in the 17th century to settle in Parnu (Estonia). At the beginning of the 19th century Gustave Faberge moved to Petersburg, and in 1842 he opened a jewellery workshop there. His son Peter-Carl Faberge, born in 1846, was educated in Italy, England and France. On his return to Petersburg in 1870, at the age of 24, he took over his father’s workshop which in a short time became a large enterprise employing 500 workers, with branches in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and London.

The art of small sculpture is rooted in antiquity; it goes back to prehistoric totems and anthropomorphic figures. The variety of styles, techniques, media, and of application is enormous. Today, too, it is a thriving art form in which much has been achieved. Yet a clear definition of what is or is not small sculpture eludes us. The only criterion that is generally agreed upon is that the maximum height is somewhere in the region of 80 — 100 cm.