The Russian porcelain figure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Karen L. Kettering

In the 1860s, the Gardner Factory was under the direction of Elizaveta Nikolaevna (nee Leman) Gardner, the widow of the great-grandson of the founder. It began to import an English clay that allowed for much finer modeling of details. (18) In another significant change, the factory switched to the production of painted, partially glazed figures and made an enormous range of ambiguous and highly charged figures devoted to "the peasant question."

Hillwood's group of three peasants returning home from a tavern is typical (P1. IX). To a modem eye it might seem to be a happy scene of three friends struggling to put on their coats and playing the last song as the evening ends. (The figure on the left should be holding a shtof [a four-sided vodka bottle] in his raised hand, but this detail was lost sometime before Marjorie Merriweather Post [see p. 82, P1. I] acquired the group.) This is perhaps the least unsettling of a number of figure groups showing women with small children in their arms leading home husbands who are so drunk they can hardly stand. In the 1870s, it was well publicized that drunkenness had increased exponentially among the newly emancipated Russian peasantry Some contemporaries interpreted this as proof that emancipation was misguided, and that rampant drunkenness was the unavoidable result of having removed the paternalistic controls of serfdom. For other educated Russians, it was the elite who were at fault. Since the seventeenth cen tury the Russian government had maintained a monopoly on vodka sales, and in the 1870s and 1880s, taxes on these sales accounted for about forty percent of government revenues. (19) In the Gardner figures, as in the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, vodka is an almost irresistible temptation for the weak-willed peasant. It is the ultimate irony that its sale supported the state as it destroyed its citizens.

This view of peasant as victim is equally evident in the figure shown in Plate VI of a sbiten'shchik, a street vendor who sold bubliki (bread rings) and sbiten', which substituted for tea among the poor. The peddler wears lapti, the birch bark shoes of the peasantry, indicating that he is a recent transplant to the city. For almost a century, the sbiten'shchiki sold their wares in city squares, offering a simple meal for poor workers or students. Gardner's series of street peddlers from the 1820s included a figure of a sbiten'shchik jauntily pouring out a cup of the beverage. However, the disheveled figure shown in Plate VI seems barely able to carry his burdens or meet the viewer's gaze. His forlorn, tired appearance suggests the ambivalence many had about the fate of the emancipated peasant in a forbidding urban environment.

Other figures, of about 1900, hark back to the sentimentalized view of a noble and virtuous peasantry that painters and writers had abandoned some three decades earlier The two figures in Plates X and XII depict handsome young peasant parents caring for and delighting in their infant children. Although these works were designed at the Gardner Factory and bear typical Gardner marks (see P1. XI), they were produced after the multimillionaire Matvei Sidorovich Kuznetsov acquired the firm in 1892 for his enormous conglomerate of ceramics factories. As part of the sales agreement, Kuznetsov secured all rights to the Gardner models and marks. (20)