The Delicate Beauty of Russian Lacquer Boxes

 

QUESTION:  I have came across a box at a thrift store and after researching I am not sure it is or is not an authentic Russian Lacquer box. I was wondering what you thought?

ANSWER: According to my research, I believe your box was made in the village of Palekh, Russia, where similar boxes have been made. Also, the illustrations on the box seem to follow those on other Palekh boxes. Boxes exported out of Russia usually have a paper sticker on the bottom indicating that the box had been made in the USSR, or for later ones, Russia. These labels often fall off, but this box also has a mark in Cyrillic script. 

Russian lacquer art developed from the art of icon painting which came to an end with the collapse of Imperial Russia. The icon painters, who previously had been employed by supplying not only churches but people's homes, needed a way to make a living. Thus, the craft of making papier-mache decorative boxes developed. They lacquered the boxes, then artists hand painted them, often with scenes from folk tales, such as the tale of the Firebird, or of Prince Igor, or of Swan Lake.

Princesses dance, czars scowl, knights do battle, horses fly, suns smile, Father Frost puffs icy wind, and lovers embrace on glossy black backgrounds of lacquered papier-mache, surrounded by spectacular borders of gold filigree. Vivid reds and yellows dominated these scenes, with greens and blues and ivories typically reserved for highlights and details.

In finer boxes, artists often applied paint over gold or silver, producing a luminescence reminiscent of traditional Russian icon painting. The brushwork could be astonishingly intricate and detailed and beautifully rendered in the kind of stylized realism associated with European miniature paintings of the Middle Ages.

Artists in four villages—Fedoskino, Palekh, Kholui and Mstyora—made these lacquered boxes. All except Fedoskino lie in the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality, Ivanovo region of central Russia, and have been deeply rooted in the 17th- to 19th-century icon painting tradition, which lasted until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The latter two villages, both north of Moscow, were for centuries an important home of traditional Russian icon painters, whose gilded portraits of-melancholy saints and dolorous Madonnas were the essential art form of czarist Russia. After the 1917 revolution, however, the new Bolshevik government banned religious art, and the icon makers turned to legends and folk tales and poems for their subjects.

The papier-mache process, used to make these lacquer boxes, took about six weeks to ensure that it wouldn’t warp, didn’t expand and contract with temperature, and had a linseed oil base which rendered it impervious to moisture. The papier-mache, itself, consisted of cardboard covered with flour paste which workers then shaped, coated with warm linseed oil, planed, and sanded. Artists applied clay, oil, and soot as an undercoating that they smoothed with a pumice stone, then lacquered and primed in preparation for the artist.

Although black was the most common color for a background, artists also used red, blue, green, and white backgrounds. Red was the most challenging background to paint on a lacquer box because the other colors don’t come forward. By contrast, a black background wasn’t only dramatic, but also the easiest color with which to work.

The crafting of Russian lacquer boxes dates back to the 18th century and the reign of Peter the Great. Originally used for holding snuff, these boxes have evolved into many different shapes and sizes for holding things like jewelry and money.

By the mid 18th century, tobacco became affordable for ordinary people, and the need for a box to hold the snuff became necessary. The wealthy had stored their snuff in boxes made out of ivory. gold, and other precious materials, but inexpensive lacquer boxes became a good alternative for poorer folk.

In 1795, while traveling to Germany, Pyotr Korobov came across the factory of Johann Heinrich Stobwasser in Braunschweig. Korobov became intrigued by the lacquer items produced there and took supplies back home to the village of Fedoskino to make his own. 

Decorated snuftboxes, made in Fedoskino in great quantities in the early 19th century by Piet:Vasieiievich Lukutin, were probably the finest of all old Russian lacquer boxes but today are extremely rare. Lukutin's boxes were durable, but the processes he employed in producing a perfect material for his lacquer work from compressed sheets of cardboard were lengthy and painstaking. Evidently Lukutin realized that the success of "japanning" depended upon the quality of the papier-mache itself. He gave his boxes numerous coatings of lacquer laboriously hand polishing them between applications. He obtained a fine patina by first soaking his boxes in vegetable oil and hardening them in low-heat ovens for a long time.

Artists decorated the earliest Lukutin boxes with themes similar to those used by English and German decorators at the time. They used landscapes and skylines as well as genre subjects. They also decorated boxes with mother-of-pearl. Toward the middle of the 19th century, they began decorating the boxes with Russian folk motifs. From 1828 on, the Lutkin family marked the boxes with the Imperial eagle and the various initials of the members of the family in charge of the factory at the time. They continued to run the business successfully until it closed in 1904.

The styles of decorations of papier-mache boxes in the village of Palekh differed from those decorated at the old Lutkin works. In 1917 some of the artists and craftsmen of the lacquer industry formed cooperatives and revived the art before it became lost. But it wasn’t until Ivan Golikov applied icon painting techniques to lacquered papier-mache in 1922 that many of the icon painters of pre-Revolutionary days began work in Palekh decorating lacquer boxes. Painted in egg tempera rather than the oils used in Fedoskino, the Palekh style is fanciful and somewhat less realistic than those of the original village. The artists of both Kholui and Mstyora also used egg tempera paint.

Another difference was the subject matter they painted and how they painted it. Fedoskino was known for realistic impressionistic scenes, while the other three focused on relic paintings that were less realistic. Originally, Palekh made relic paintings for the rich: Kholuy and Mstyora made relic paintings for the middle class and poor.

Palekh boxes appeared at the beginning of the 20th century almost always on a black background. Along with historical subjects, Palekh's artists also painted contemporary themes and scenes of rural life, such as threshing, harvesting, and hay-mowing. Their depictions of humans tend to have much longer bodies than those of Kholuy or Mstyora. Palekh lacquer boxes almost always have a hand-painted golden border design. But it was the artists Ivan Gofikov and his brother-in-law Alexander Glazunov who really made Palekh famous for its lacquer boxes which had the most sophisticated decoration, considered unrivaled in composition, color, and execution.

Tourist guides frequently tell their tour groups that a signature on the bottom of the box indicates that a master painted it. However, in reality most lacquer boxes came from small factories where signing another artist's name was no more difficult than painting in his style. Instead of checking for the signature of an artist, buyers should consider the quality and detail of the artwork_ Many of the lacquer boxes produced in the former Soviet Union have exceptional detail and command astronomical prices, yet have no signature. Box sellers rather then the artists themselves have perpetuated the signature myth of the signatures.

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Fulfilling the Need for Warmth and Comfort

QUESTION: On a recent road trip through the Southwest, I stopped at a flea market in Arizona where I found an old Indian blanket in black and white on a red background which I purchased for my bed back home. It looked to be in good shape and the price was right. Can you tell me which tribe may have made it and perhaps how old it is?

ANSWER: While your blanket may look like it had been made by one of the Native American tribes in the area, it actually wasn’t. Contrary to what most people think, blankets like this—known as American Indian trade blankets—were commercially machine-woven for the Native American market. Prior to the production of these blankets, Native Americans provided  warmth for themselves using natural materials and traditional weaving techniques.

Native Americans had long engaged in intertribal trading for useful items, but it was the colorful European goods that caught their attention. Over time, traders upgraded their goods from beads, looking glasses, and fish hooks to more practical items such as metal axes and cookware, flintlock rifles, and blankets. To trade a beaver skin or two for a durable woolen European blanket seemed fair to 18th and 19th-century Native Americans. Making a robe from an elk, deer, or buffalo hide was a time consuming, labor intensive process.

It was the French traders who began trading blankets as a result of their insatiable need for beaver pelts in the early l7º-century in the St. Lawrence River area. By 1780, the British Hudson's Bay Company soon followed suit.

Blanket trading soon spread across America. The Hudson's Bay Company shipped hundreds of blankets to St. Louis, the last supply outpost for those venturing westward in the 1820s and 1830s. While those heading to the Rocky Mountains trapped their own beavers, those going north into the Upper Missouri region traded for beaver pelts with the Native Americans

The early Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets were a solid color with a wide darker band near each end. They sold their thick, striped blankets to trappers who, in turn, traded them to the Blackfeet and Northern Plains Indians.

Like any successful product, Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets attracted imitators. While some copied the Bay's blanket style, especially the bright multicolor pattern introduced around 1820, other companies duplicated geometric Indian designs.

By 1845 there were dozens of woolen manufacturers in America, but only 11 who made blankets, and just one, the Buffalo Manufacturing Company, which made Indian-style blankets.

The introduction of the Jacquard loom in the 1880s created a boon to the blanket business. It enabled blankets to have two sides and launched what historians and collectors call the 'Golden Age" of the American Indian trade blanket that lasted from 1880 to 1930.

Eventually, five major woolen mills began making Indian trade blankets in the United States during the latter part of the 19th century—J. Capps and Sons, Oregon City Woolen Mills, Buell Manufacturing Company, Racine Woolen Mills, and Pendleton Woolen Mills. Another, the Beacon Manufacturing Company of North Carolina, made Indian-style blankets for the American consumer.

Of the above makers, Pendleton is the most familiar label. It’s also the only one still in existence. The company credits its early success to marketing its blankets directly to Native American reservations through trading posts and producing colors and designs acceptable to specific tribes.

By the late 19th century, most Native Americans had settled on reservations. Trading posts became the distribution points for food, jewelry, clothes and, of course, blankets. Through the trading posts, the English and American woolen mills found a built-in market for their blankets, the quality and designs of which Native Americans appreciated. Eager to please their Native American customers, many mills sent designers to live among the Indians in order to learn what designs and colors would appeal to the different tribes and pueblos across the United States and Canada. From the beginning, Pendleton produced high-quality blankets that eventually became the favorite among Native Americans.

Unlike Europeans, many native people became bonded with their blankets day and night. The fact that they were made by someone else made no difference.

They gave blankets as gifts to celebrate births, marriages, and christenings. They also used blankets to pay off debts, to show gratitude, or to indicate status. And some used them to provide temporary shelter, as curtains or awnings, or for warmth and adornment. Native Americans cradled their babies in blankets, danced in blankets, and were often buried in blankets.

The name Pendleton became a universal and generic name for any of these distinctively patterned blankets, even those made by other mills. Today, collectors seek out pre-World War II blankets for their light weight and warmth.


To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  the Industrial Age n the 2020 Winter Edition, "The Wonders of the Industrial Age," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.