Paintings on porcelain vases at Hillwood

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Anne Odom

In the course of the nineteenth century the Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg produced a remarkable number of vases, many decorated with copies of old master or popular nineteenth-century paintings. The factory artists increasingly used the central section of the vase as an easel for reproducing favorite paintings, instead of creating original ornament. Production reached its height during the reign of Nicholas I, when, along with table services, vases were a mainstay of the factory. They were used not only to decorate the many palaces, mansions, and pavilions that were being constructed in the still relatively new city of Saint Petersburg, but they were also ideally suited for grand presentation gifts to both foreigners and Russians. In the 1860s they were increasingly sent to international expositions to show off the technical and artistic abilities of the factory.

Of the five pairs and six single vases made in the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the collection at the Hillwood Museum and Gardens most are decorated with paintings. The earliest vase dates from 1816-1825 during the reign of Alexander I (r. 1801--1825), and the latest was painted in 1862 during the reign of Alexander II (r. 1855--1881), at a time when these grandiose display objects were beginning to go out of fashion. (1)

Elizabeth Petrovna (r. 1741--1761), the daughter of Peter I (the Great; r. 1682--1725), fulfilled one of her father's dreams when she founded the Imperial Porcelain Factory in 1744. However, only with the reorganization of the factory in 1765 under Catherine II (the Great; r. 1762-- 1796) did production begin to increase and quality improve. Few vases remain from the reign of Catherine II, but those that do are usually egg-shaped and simply but elegantly, decorated with neoclassical motifs. (2)

Jean Francois Xavier Hattenburger (or Frants Gattenberger; d. c.1820), a technical specialist who came to Russia from Geneva in the reign of Catherine II, recommended technical innovations during the reign of Alexander I, and in 1816 produced two albums of drawings that defined the basic shape and ornamentation of vases for many years. (3)

Characteristic of Hattenburger's designs were handles, often in the shape of figures, that were raised above the lip of the vase.

However, the mermaids on the vase inPlates I and Ia have the classical grace of figures designed by Stepan Stepanovich Pimenov (1784-1833), the head of the sculpture departments at the Academy of Arts and the Imperial Factory. These glazed white figures with gilded laurel wreaths on their heads stand Out against the matte green ground of the vase itself. (4) Glazed white acanthus leaves and palmettes decorate the base of the body of the vase. (5)

The central surface of the vase has been turned into a canvas for two scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. On one side is Venus and Adonis (P1. Ia) and on the other are a satyr and a nymph. The factory artist copied them from paintings attributed to the school of Raphael that hang in the Hall of the Italian Renaissance at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The Hermitage paintings were originally frescoes completed by students of Raphael in 1523-1524 in the Villa Palatina in Rome and later transferred to canvas. These five paintings were from the important collection of Giampietro Campana (1808-1880), marchese di Cavelli, in Rome, part of which the Russians acquired in 1861 and installed in the Hermitage. (6)

Although the ancient Greek forms of the krater and amphora provided the prototypes for the Russian vases, the classical shapes were not rigorously copied. Most of the Hillwood vases are of two types. The krater, which the Russians ca]led Medici (Meditsis), bad a fairly straight body that flared out at the top (see Pl. VII). The body rested on a short stem mounted on a stand. The handles were low, affixed at the bottom of the body. The bandeau (or bando) vase, as it was referred to at the Imperial Factory, was an elongated egg shape with a long neck (Pl. VI). The handles on this type are mounted on the shoulders of the body.

After the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815), vases began to be decorated with copies of old master paintings and popular contemporary paintings, both Russian and European. Copying paintings onto the surface of a plate or vase began at Sevres and flourished in Berlin and Saint Petersburg. Nowhere else in Europe, however, were so many paintings copied on vases or for as long a duration as in Russia. Russian vases, with their paintings fully framed in tooled gold, took on the aspect of a small-scale moveable picture gallery.

Copying paintings tended to stifle creativity as factory artists developed into professional copyists. In this role they were superb, achieving a remarkable precision when the painting on porcelain is compared to the original. The artists were gifted at learning how to adjust paintings to the curved surface of the vase, avoiding distortion. Baron Nikolai fonVol'f(1866-1940), the director of the Imperial Factory from 1900 to 1912 and the author of the classic history of the factory published in 1906, commended the abilities of the artists as copyists, but regretted their lack of independence. (7) Foreign visitors, too, commented on the vases produced during the reign of Nicholas I. Frances Anne Vane (1800--1865), marchioness of Londonderry, who with her husband made the grand tour of northern Europe and Russia in 1836 and 1837, observed on her visit to the Hermitage "some superb china vases of immense size....The gilding equaled and the painting surpassed the modem Sevres." (8) Johann Georg Kohl (1808-1878), a German traveling in Russia in 1842, disagreed: "Splendid specimens of vases are turned out by the imperial porcelain manufactory, which, however, appears by no means qualified to compete with other institutions of the kind abroad." (9)