russian collection hand painted lacquer boxes

Today the pendulum of taste has swung away from these miniature masterpieces, and the youngest members of village families who have made boxes and icons for countless generations are applying their talent and skills to more lucrative endeavors. It is estimated that the Soviet government earned more than $1 million a year selling these lacquered miniatures to foreign tourists visiting Russia and foreign collectors abroad. During the Soviet period, some of the most elaborate boxes sold for tens of thousands of dollars. In the 1930s and 1940s two more towns joined in this industry: Mstera and Kholui. The artists often used gold and other metal powders to give the boxes their trademark mother-of-pearl or translucent sheen. Both factories produced boxes that were made of papier-mâché and painted with oil paints (not tempera, as in Palekh). The factory passed down through the heirs as the Lukutin Factory, which was synonymous with lacquer boxes until the Vishnyakov family began competing with them. Papier-mâché came from the town of Fedoskino, not far from Moscow, where more than 200 years ago Ivan Korobov established a factory to produce lacquer works. In Palekh, the artists used tempera paint on wooden boxes and only began to use papier-mâché as a base in 1923 when they formed an artel, or cooperative. After seeing Asian miniatures at an exhibition in the capital, he had the idea of “retraining” the icon painters to use their formidable skills and talent on secular boxes. Please visit our Fedoskino and Palekh pages to see our complete collection of beautiful Russian Lacquer Boxes. In the early 1920s, a Moscow artist named Ivan Golikov came to the rescue of the village painters. Russian Lacquer Boxes are made from an art form known as Papier-Mache, a type of cardboard that is made from layers of glued paper boiled in linseed oil and then carefully dried and primed. That might not be true, but it is a fact that the town, along with Kholui and Mstera, was famous for the icon-painters, who were even invited to Moscow to paint some of the Kremlin palaces and churches.īut that all ended with the 1917 Revolution and the destruction of the Orthodox Church. Legend has it that icon painters in Suzdal and Vladimir fled the attacking Tatar-Mongol armies in the 13th century and settled on the Paleshka River in a town that would become Palekh.

Russian collection hand painted lacquer boxes