The Russian porcelain figure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Karen L. Kettering

One of the distinctive characteristics of Russian decorative arts of the nineteenth century is the number and diversity of porcelain figures produced. It is immediately clear that these figures almost obsessively explored Russian national identity politics, and cultural life through the depiction of the peasantry the ethnic groups inhabiting the vast Russian empire, and the familiar figures from the streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Based on the number of Russian figures in antiques shops in Europe and the United States, production must have been staggering. Yet despite their profusion and evident popularity these figures have received little scholarly attention.

That figures should come to occupy such an important place in Russian porcelain production was hardly preordained. Indeed, the country's religious heritage inhibited the rapid development of the genre. The church had interpreted the biblical prohibition against graven images to forbid the creation of sculpture in the round until the early eighteenth century. Peter I (the Great r. 1682-1725) hired Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli (c. 1675-1744) Nicolas Pineau (1684-1754), and other sculptors to ornament the gardens and palaces of his new city of Saint Petersburg and to train Russian students in the unfamiliar art of sculpture.

There is some disagreement as to when porcelain figures were first made in Russian factories. (1) The country's first factory to produce hard-paste porcelain was the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg, founded in 1744 under the auspices of Elizabeth Petrovna (r. 1741-1762). As in Dresden, the factory workers struggled to achieve a ceramic body that could be molded into pleasing shapes. In Russia this was the more difficult for lack of sculptors accustomed to modeling small-scale objects in any material. (2) Therefore, it was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that porcelain figures were made with any frequency.

One of the earliest incentives for the consistent production of porcelain figures was the extraordinary porcelain dessert service made at the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin and given by Frederick II (the Great of Prussia; r. 1740-1786) to Catherine II (the Great; r. 1762-1796) in 1772 to commemorate Russia's victories over the Ottoman Empire in 1770. It was known as the Berlin Service in Russia and the Katherinen-service in German sources. (3) The centerpiece depicts the empress enthroned under a baldachin and surrounded by figures of Hercules, Minerva, Mars, and other gods celebrating her military achievements. Encircling this are smaller groups of the various peoples of the Russian empire, kneeling in supplication before the empress. Standing figures of the "free arts" under Catherine's protection and representatives of the various groups in Russia were placed along the length of the table.

Although the design and painting of the terpiece are examples of the heights that porcelain sculpture could achieve in the eighteenth century, the various peoples of Russia were incompletely represented. There were only Russians, Tatars, Poles, Cossacks, and Kalmucks, and a number of the figures are repeated. This must have annoyed Catherine who carefully monitored European depictions of Russia and her citizens. (4) This probably, at least in part, caused her to commission a series of the Peoples of Russia (see P1. IV) from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the l790s. This group came to serve as an addition, one might even say, an antidote, to the figures in the Berlin Service. (5) The substantial time lag between the receipt of the Berlin Service in 1772 and the creation of the Russian series more than a decade later was due to the absence of a model master at the imperial factory until the sculptor Jacques Dominique Rachette (see Pl. IV) was hired in 1779. (6) His design source was Johann Gottlieb Georgi's Beschreibung aller Nationen des russischen Reichs... [Description of all the peoples living in the Russian nation] (Saint Petersburg, 1776-1780), which was based on nearly twenty scientific expeditions and described each group's language, geographic distribution, appearance, religion, architecture, literature, and so forth. (7) Each chapter was illustrated with hand-colored engravings depicting men, women, and children in dress appropriate to the seasons or their economic circumstances. The records of the porcelain factory indicate that many figures from the Peoples of Russia series were presented as imperial and diplomatic gifts between 1790 and 1810.8 By the mid-1790s it had become fashionable to use only biscuit porcelain figures on the table, suggesting that the two glazed and painted figures in Hillwood's collection should be dated to the 1780s and early 1790s. (9)

For the first twenty years the Imperial Porcelain Factory had little competition except for imported wares whose prices were inflated by import taxes. However, in 1766 the market was transformed when Francis Gardner (w. 1746-1786), an English entrepreneur, established a porcelain factory in the village of Verbilki in the Moscow province. Under his direction, and later his son's and grandchildren's, the factory earned a reputation for producing high quality, finely made goods in the latest fashions.