The Rossi Wing

Carved and Painted Wooden Works of the 19th – Early 20th Centuries

Room VI presents carved and painted wood from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A painted cupboard from Petryakovskaya village, Shenkursk district, Archangel Province (1892) gives an idea of the simplicity and constructiveness of peasant furniture. Wedding shaft bows were important ceremonial objects and were decorated not only with festive painting, but also with gilt.

In the nineteenth century one of the large centres of painting was situated in the Permogorye district on the Northern Dvina. Wooden dippers, bowls, mugs, birch bark barrels, punnets and bast boxes were painted there. On the River Uftyug, there was a widespread craft of painted barrels. The Mezen paintings are distinguished by monochrome colours and mostly geometric ornamentation. Only the distaffs were decorated with rows of running deer and horses.

Russian distaffs demonstrate the local peculiarities of wood carving and painting. This object was of special importance in folk households. A tool of female labour in spinning, it was both a ritual item during girls’ get-togethers and a father’s wedding gift to his daughter, who entered a new family life.

Any distaff consists of three parts – a small spindle, to which a tow was tied, a leg and a seat, where the spinner sat. Distaffs of almost all regions possessed their own peculiarities of forms and decor, mostly on the small spindles and legs, giving each type of distaff its own unique artistic character. In villages near Gorodets in Nizhny Novgorod Province, masters decorated not the spindle or the leg, but the seat of the distaff. When work was completed, the spinner stood up from the seat and hung it on the wall as a picture. In the first half of the nineteenth century, seats were decorated with masterly fretwork and inlays of water-seasoned oak. In the early 1870s, painting replaced fretwork. The subjects of the Gorodets fretwork and, later, paintings, were compositions of festivities, feasts, wedding parties and hunts.

Russian Museum collection also features works with the Khohloma painting. Enormous bowls, dishes, jugs, tubs and spoons of various forms, turned or cut out of wood, were rubbed with a special prime coating from tin powder, painted with traditional floral ornaments and, after drying, covered with a layer of clear drying oil.

A centre of birch bark carving emerged in Vologda Province on the Shomoksa River near Veliky Ustyug. In spring, peasants gathered the bark of young birches and, after steaming it in a Russian oven, used it to create birch bark lace. The pattern was made by a blunt awl and then carved using a sharp knife. Such open-work birch bark was applied to birch bark vessels, caskets, boxes, spectacle cases and other objects of various forms and sizes.