Ceramics and glass

The museum’s collection of pottery contains items from the late 18th century to the present day. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, according to researchers, there were about 700 settlements on the territory of Ukraine where potters worked. Valky, Nova Vodolaha and Izium became significant centres of pottery in Kharkiv region. In Valky in particular lived and worked a master such as Fedir Hnidyi, whose varied works are kept by our museum: the money box “Lion”, the jug “Peas”, the sculptural compositions “Chapaev’s Men at a Halt” and “A Flock of Sheep”, and others. Beginning in the 1930s, whole ceramic schools and production cooperatives took shape in Kharkiv region: “Nove Selo” (Valky, late 1930s), “Budianska Tsehla” (1940s–1950s), the Nova Vodolaha district industrial combine (1950s) and “Prohres” (Valky district, 1950s). Their products are represented in our collection by vases, kumanets vessels, jugs and so on. In addition, the collection keeps numerous products of the “Khudozhnii Keramik” cooperative (Opishne village, late 1950s) and of the Opishne ceramic school. The latter is represented, in particular, by a considerable collection of author’s works by Rozaliia Chabanenko (1970s–1990s).

The pottery kept in the museum’s collection varies in purpose and names. There is the so-called “babushnyk”, a cylindrical vessel in which bread was baked; and the “baran” (ram) and “lev” (lion), ritual zoomorphic vessels in the form of a sculpture of a ram or a lion, used for keeping and pouring strong drinks and wine.

Among the jugs one can single out:

• the “hladushchyk”, a milk jug: a tall vessel with or without a handle for keeping dairy products and water;
• a jug for holy water: ornamented and glazed, in which water was carried to the church for blessing;
• the “zlyvushnyk”: small, with a wide neck and a small spout (“mug”) on the rim, used for keeping sour cream and milk and for pouring liquids.

Pots are also divided by purpose:

• ordinary ones, for cooking various dishes;
• the “twins” (“horniata”), two small pots joined by one ring-shaped handle; they were used for carrying hot dishes to the field; on Christmas Eve small godchildren carried in them kutia and uzvar to their godparents;
• the “syrun” (night pot), a pot with a handle for relieving oneself.

The collection also has “nosatky”, vessels with a spout and three handles, which were used as a wash-stand, for pouring oil at markets and “boiled” oil at family celebrations. The museum’s collection has very many bowls with their own names: “shlonky” (with wavy rims) and “kandiiky” or “zatyrachky” (with edges curved inward), used for crushing garlic and lard for borshch, grinding millet and so on; and various kumanets vessels (ritual vessels for pouring strong drinks at weddings), both old and modern.

Interesting are the collection of toys, part of which belonged to the H. S. Skovoroda Museum of Sloboda Ukraine, and the collection of sculptures with which one can recreate in an ethnographic display the merry wedding rite (here are the newlyweds in festive dress, the quarrelsome mother-in-law, the noisy mother-in-law of the bride, masqueraders dressed as Roma, and others).

Small is the collection of Cossack pipes, among which are souvenirs and quite old ones, such as the three pipes found in 1954 on the Pyliava field, the place of the battles of B. Khmelnytskyi with the Polish nobility.

A significant part of the “Ceramics, Glass” collection consists of items of art porcelain and faience. The basis of the collection is European (not very numerous), Russian and Ukrainian porcelain and faience of the mid-18th to the late 20th century. It presents the products of the best-known enterprises, which do honour to their creators.

The Meissen manufactory, founded in 1701 in Germany by Böttger, the inventor of European porcelain, is represented by small vases of various shapes, a basket-shaped butter dish with handles, plates with cut-out edges, tea and coffee cups (flower-shaped and cylindrical) and one sculpture, “Dancing Couple”. This manufactory was characterised by its own special artistic style, with light, free forms and bright, cheerful painting.

The Berlin Royal Factory, founded by Wilhelm Caspar Wegely in 1751, is represented mainly by plates (light, with openwork rims, almost weightless in appearance), a cup with an image of the Madonna and Child and a milk jug. All these items came to us from the H. S. Skovoroda Historical Museum of Sloboda Ukraine.

Products of the Sèvres factory, founded in France in the 1750s, are represented in the museum’s collection by a small number of bright and expressive items: large (74 cm) floor vases (turquoise, with pastoral scenes on the body and shaped gilded handles); deep and shallow plates decorated with flowers; a cachepot vase (cobalt blue, with images of a bird and flowers in cartouches and small gilded handles); and two large decorative dishes with gilded rims in turquoise (the colour characteristic of Sèvres ceramics) and pastoral scenes in the centre.

Having looked at the products of several of the main Western European manufactories kept in our collection, we turn to Russian ceramics.

The first porcelain factory in Russia was the St Petersburg Porcelain Manufactory, which from 1765 worked under the name “Imperial Porcelain Factory” (IPF); the main direction of its activity was serving the tsar’s court: making interior items and large ceremonial services. The first palace service, created in 1756–1762 “by supreme order”, was the one that went down in history under the name “Her Majesty’s Own Table and Dessert Service of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna”. From 1838, in the reign of Nicholas I, the factory began to make so-called “replacements” for lost items of services. Two plates, replacements of that time, are in our collection. Their artistic design is unusual: the surface is covered with a so-called “trellis lattice” with the cells diminishing toward the centre, and small rosette flowers where the lines cross. One more of the oldest items, belonging to the times of Elizabeth, is a basket vase with openwork sides.

A cup and saucer of white porcelain that belonged to the “Alexandria” service are not quite remarkable at first glance, but are interesting for the history of their making. This service of 530 items was made in 1829 in the Gothic style for the palace of Nicholas I and Alexandra Feodorovna in the Alexandria park in Peterhof. The items bear the coat of arms of the city of Alexandria (after a drawing by the poet V. A. Zhukovskyi): in the centre of a blue knight’s shield with the motto “For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland” is a sword passed through a wreath of white roses. The items in our collection are “replacements” for the service (they were made until the early 20th century), as shown by the marks on them: on the cup the monogram of Alexander III, and on the saucer that of Nicholas II.

Other interesting IPF items in the museum collection are:

• two plates that were part of the main body of the “Gothic Service” of 150 items (using motifs of medieval stained-glass ornamentation), presented by Empress Alexandra Feodorovna to her husband for Christmas 1833;
• a bottle stand, the only item in the museum’s collection that belonged to the “Konstantin Service” (more often called the “VKKM” service, for Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaievich), which was made in 1848 on the occasion of the marriage of Nicholas I’s second son Konstantin. The models for the vessel forms of this service were the characteristic forms of Old Rus and Byzantine vessels of gold and silver: cups, bratinas, ladles and so on.

The first private porcelain enterprise in Russia was the factory of F. Ya. Gardner, founded in 1766 in the village of Verbilky in Moscow Governorate. Its products are represented in the collection both by simple and comparatively cheap things and by items for a narrow circle of rich buyers: a plate, a soup tureen, a cup and saucer (with a child’s drawing, on three gilded paw feet), a vase and various cups and saucers decorated with hand painting. But the greatest attention is drawn by items from the 3 order dinner services made to the order of Catherine II for receptions of knights of the orders on the corresponding order days: three plates from the St George service made in 1778; one plate from the St Alexander service of 30 items, made in 1780; and a set of items from the St Vladimir service, completed in 1785 (a plate, two rusk dishes, six cream pots and ten knife handles), which was the most costly and numerous (140 items). The factory also made small-form sculpture, represented in the museum’s collection by the figures “Boys Wrestling”, “The Sbiten Seller”, “The Ukrainian” and “The Dependant Woman”.

The collection also has a small (more than 20 items) but significant group of items of the Volokytyne factory, which arose in the second half of the 1830s on the estate of the landowner A. M. Miklashevskyi in the village of Volokytyne in the Hlukhiv district of the former Chernihiv Governorate (now Sumy Oblast). Its products are distinguished by the ingenuity of their forms, the quality of the paints and the richness of the colours: an ashtray in the form of a shell, on a foot; milk jugs; a gilded faceted sugar bowl and teapot; a vase in the form of an elongated flower; a vessel in the form of a man in a kaftan and hat sitting on a chair; the sculptures “Joan of Arc”, “Christ Blessing”, “Monkey” and so on.

The museum collection also has items of another well-known enterprise, the factory of O. H. Popov (1811, Gorbunovo village, Dmitrov district, Moscow Governorate). Popov’s sculptures are distinguished by realism and filled with lyrical feeling; his tableware is characterised by decorativeness and a love of bright colours, and his so-called tavern tableware with hemispherical cups of very successful proportions became especially famous. From our exhibits (and there are about 20) one can form an idea of the original style of this factory: plates decorated with flowers, arabesques, gilding and an image of a noble coat of arms (considered rare), cups of different shapes, vases, the sculpture “Cavalier”, and a butter dish in the form of a black-brown tortoise.

A significant place in the “Ceramics, Glass” collection of the museum is taken by products of the enterprises that belonged to the Kuznetsov family and in the second half of the 19th century became the largest suppliers of porcelain, faience and other kinds of ceramic items on the Russian and world markets. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries they owned 18 enterprises in various regions of the Russian Empire. The holdings keep items from the most significant factories: “on the Volkhov” (Novgorod Governorate), in Riga, in Dulevo, in the village of Verbilky in Moscow Governorate, in the village of Pesochnia (Kaluga Governorate), “in Tver” (the village of Kuznetsovo in Tver Governorate) and in Budy in Kharkiv Governorate. By the early 20th century the enterprises had developed the range that these factories produced until 1917. There were more than 370 shapes of cups alone. The collection keeps cups in the form of a small barrel with a lid; in the form of a samovar with a spout and a foot; with a handle in the form of an axe; an ovoid one with a small lid, on a foot, resembling an Easter egg, with the inscription “Kh.V.” (“Christ is Risen”), and others. Cups with simple floral decoration and occasional gilding, supplemented with inscriptions such as “I give on your name day”, leave a pleasant impression by their modesty and simplicity. One of the cups in the collection was produced by the factory in Verbilky for the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812 and bears the scene “The Council of War at Fili”. In addition, many kinds of plates and dishes (round and ovoid) and rusk dishes (in the form of baskets and leaves) are presented, as well as kinds of candlesticks, a pumpkin-shaped butter dish, a sugar bowl in the shape of a boat decorated with images of angels, and others. Among these items two vases draw attention, the “Marquis” and the “Marquise”, decorated with sculptures of a man and a woman in 18th-century costume and with lavish moulded ornament.

Kuznetsov pursued the aim not only of completely taking over the domestic market but also of becoming a worldwide supplier of his products. The populations of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Turkey began to prefer his “Eastern” goods to all others, and in some regions of Eastern China Kuznetsov products were considered more “Chinese” than the local production. The collection includes several plates and a teapot from the so-called “Chinese” service made at the Budy factory, decorated with landscapes and images of a man and a woman in Chinese national dress.

The museum’s holdings also keep individual items of such private factories as the factory of the Kornilov brothers (St Petersburg), whose products gained worldwide fame for their quality and were more costly than those of other factories; the factory of Khrapunov-Novyi (the village of Kuziaievo, Bogorodsk district); the Ikonnikov factory (items of the highest grade); the factory of the Gulin family (the village of Rechytsi); and others.

The production of porcelain on the territory that is part of present-day Ukraine in the late 18th and first third of the 19th century has several common features. The factories were created on the estates of large landowners, which determined the ways and amounts of funding for the enterprises, the range and cost of the products and the formation of a staff of workers, mostly serfs. All the products share the obligatory use of classical design with elements of the Baroque, Rococo and Empire styles. The best-known productions of this period are the factories in Korets and Baranivka. The first functioned in the old town of Korets in Volhynia on the estate of Prince Yu. Czartoryski from 1784 to 1831. And at the beginning of the 1800s another factory was founded in the town of Baranivka, also in Volhynia, on the estate of the magnates Lubomirski-Walewski. The collection of the Kharkiv Historical Museum has 12 items of the Korets and 19 of the Baranivka factories. The overwhelming majority of these items were already part of the collection of the Museum of Sloboda Ukraine, to which, as the accounting documents show, they were transferred from the Sumy Museum. Since the enterprises developed in parallel and close production ties existed between them, it is appropriate to consider their products together. Stylistic features of decoration were large colourful bouquets and single flowers on a white ground. Such products are represented by three Korets and three Baranivka plates with large flowers, a Korets tray with an openwork rim and a teapot with a bouquet on an ovoid body. Particular attention is drawn by two Korets rusk-dish vases with openwork cut-out rims: in the centre of one is a blue bouquet, in the centre of the other a monogram of two intertwined letters “H” and “V”. Another characteristic kind of decoration is a frieze of stylised leaves: oak on a Korets plate and vine on two Baranivka shell-shaped rusk dishes. Overglaze painting of items with scattered stylised cornflowers was popular. In our collection this motif is illustrated by items of the Baranivka factory: an octagonal rusk dish, a plate and a soup tureen in a shape similar to a kylix. From the example of the small collection of items of these enterprises one can see that the range was wide.

Worth mentioning is one more original kind of product of these enterprises, apothecary jars. They were traditionally made using antique forms: ovoid, on a foot, resembling vase forms, and decorated on the white body with wreaths of flowers surrounding the Latin inscription of the name of the medicine. The collection keeps three such vessels.

The glory of Ukrainian faience as the best in Russia was won by the Kyiv-Mezhyhirya Faience Factory, founded in 1798 on the site of the former Mezhyhirya monastery. In 1801 it began producing goods distinguished by a plastic faience body, thin modelled forms and high quality of execution. The range of products was very large: all kinds of table, tea and coffee ware, items of decorative and utilitarian purpose and small-form biscuit sculpture. The collection of the Kharkiv Historical Museum keeps 5 items from the Babolovo service, made in 1824–1825 to order for the Babolovo Palace in Tsarskoe Selo: two deep plates, a large dish, a sauté pan and a sauce boat. These are the earliest products of Mezhyhirya faience in the museum’s collection. Innovative techniques were used in making the service: a coloured (terracotta) body and a printed design (a wreath of vine in black). In the 1830s more complex forms and a tendency to lavishness appear in ceramics. An example of this is the so-called “Guipure Service”, created after English models. It is a service for 40 persons in blue faience, made in 1832 to the order of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in the Empire style and decorated with a continuous fine relief ornament of flowers and leaves. 10 items of this service have been preserved in the museum’s holdings: five deep plates, two shallow ones, two cups and one saucer. In addition, the collection has many plates and rusk dishes of coloured bodies (green, yellow, brown) decorated with stylised relief bunches of grapes with large leaves and relief landscapes. In the 1840s icons began to be produced in large numbers; one of them, the icon “The Ascension of Christ”, painted over a relief image, is kept in our collection.

After 1917 some of the ceramic factories continued to exist and became the basis of the Soviet porcelain and faience industry: the M. V. Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory (the former IPF), the Dmitrov Porcelain Factory (the former Gardner–Kuznetsov), the factories of the former ceramic empire of the Kuznetsovs, among them the factories in Dulevo, in Tver (from 1924 named after M. I. Kalinin, now Konakovo), in Novgorod Oblast (“Proletarii”, “Bronnitsy”), Pesochnia and, of course, the Budy Faience Factory (in 1922 the enterprise was included in the All-Ukrainian trust “Porcelain, Faience, Glass”). The collection has a small group of products of these factories (the Budy ones are more numerous), but among them are quite interesting items. Porcelain of the 1920s–1930s is customarily called propaganda porcelain. It is a vivid document of its time that conveyed to us in artistic form the mood of that historical period. Ordinary painting was replaced by new subjects, ornaments and symbols, on which outstanding artists worked. Thus, the holdings keep products among which are a plate made by the artist M. Adamovych with a portrait of V. I. Lenin after a drawing by N. Altman; sculptures by the artists V. Kuznetsov and N. Danko (“Militiaman”, “Sailor”, “Hooligan”, “Footballer”, “Sportswoman”); a plate with the inscription “We will turn the whole world into a blossoming garden”; a cup with a portrait of V. I. Lenin and the coat of arms of the USSR with the inscription “Lenin’s cause will outlive the centuries. Proletarians of all countries, unite!..”; a cup with a saucer showing a man sitting at the wheel of a tractor and the inscription “To the best shock worker of the KhTZ Comrade V. I. Khokhula / 1933…”; another presentation cup “From the workers of the industrial districts of the Irkutsk region, Usolye, Cheremkhovo and the Lena goldfields… to the delegate of the congress // Greetings to the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) for the Bolshevik unity of the party and the proletarian dictatorship” (1924); and others.

The museum collection has quite a few items of the Budy factory from the early 1950s to the 2000s: various cups and vases (large floor vases and small ones) with which delegates of various congresses were awarded; dishes devoted to the anniversaries of the founding of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR and to the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War (with images of orders); dishes and vases showing political figures (Stalin, Lenin, Dzerzhinskyi, Kotovskyi, Shchors and others), writers and composers (Tchaikovsky, Lysenko, Mussorgsky, Shevchenko, Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Franko, Gorky); and a small collection of plates with views of Kharkiv. Later significant events in the country are also reflected on the tableware: the flight into space (dishes and vases with images of Yu. Gagarin and other cosmonauts) and the Moscow Olympics (plates, salt cellars and souvenirs with Olympic symbols).

In 2006 the “Budianskyi Faience” company ceased to exist, and the museum’s collection was supplemented with about 7,700 items from its museum. One of the oldest exhibits of this collection is a dish painted by Maksym Ivanovych Stanin in 1897 (two large, bright apples and the words along the rim: “Bread and salt”). Particular attention is drawn to the author’s services “The Pokrovskyi Cathedral”, “The Homestead”, “Halia Carries Water”, “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and others by the artists B. P. Piianida, H. D. Chernova, L. V. Antonova, H. I. Klombytska and many others.

A considerable part of the museum’s collection consists of items of glass, whose chronological limits run from the end of the 17th century to the present day. A special place in it is taken by items of blown glass: a collection of 19 four-sided bottle-decanters (shtofs) makes it possible to examine the various forms and decor of these items. Most of them were made by free blowing from clear colourless glass and have a short neck that was attached separately. Three shtofs are of coloured glass, one of semi-white. Two items have a complicated form: concave faces and cut corners. We have examples that differ in decoration: painted with enamel and oil paints, faceted, with matt faces, and with chemical etching. Floral motifs and images of a double-headed eagle under a crown predominate in the painting. Unique is a shtof decorated with the rather rare carpet-like ornamentation: stylised flowers without stems of the “sunflower” or “daisy” type with 8-pointed and 4-pointed stars. A rather valuable part of the collection of the Kharkiv Historical Museum is 3 shtofs with the monograms of Catherine I, Catherine II and Alexander I on one of the wide faces.

The specifics of folk ritual influenced the appearance and rather long existence of figured tableware and glass items made to resemble bears, rams, fish and so on. A prominent place among figured vessels in our collection is taken by examples of 3 variants of a “bear” bottle. The “bear” always stands on 3 paws and holds its head with the other two. This composition combines folk humour with a purely practical consideration: the fifth paw is needed to give the vessel stability. Two “bears” of coloured glass are smooth, the others are decorated with moulding. Figurines of animals and birds combined features of the folk toy and of decorative sculpture, an example of which are the items in the collection: “cockerel”, “ruffe”, “little ram” and “little dog”.

The collection of glass items contains various objects: tumblers; 2 tea caddies decorated with painting; small barrels, shot glasses and goblets decorated with engraving; and lighting devices. Interesting in form are a footed bowl with two handles (18th century), a bottle in the form of a bust of General M. D. Skobelev with the inscription “Skobelev II, 1890”, and a hunting two-chamber powder flask of greenish glass (18th century).

The museum collection contains a numerous collection of bottles of various shapes (ovoid, rectangular, conical, many-sided and others), both old, of the 18th–19th centuries, and modern, made by the “Kalinkin, St Petersburg–Moscow” Company, the “Kharkiv Joint-Stock Company New Bavaria”, the “Kharkiv Plant of Artificial Mineral Waters”, the Merefa Glass Factory, the “Brewery in Moscow”, the “Kharkiv Brewery of I. Ye. Ihnatyshchev” and other factories.

There is a numerous collection of various perfume bottles and apothecary ware. They were issued by “Brocard and Co. in Moscow”, “Galenin Company. Kharkiv”, “V. K. Ferrein Company” and others. There are items of crystal from the mid-18th century (small decanters of Bohemian crystal with gilding, an inkwell) and modern ones: vases and sugar bowls (gifts of members of Czechoslovak delegations). The holdings also keep a crystal lid with the monogram “NKh”, which N. P. Kharytonenko, the daughter of the sugar manufacturer P. I. Kharytonenko, gave to her dressmaker. Small is the collection of items decorated with beads: embroidered purses and tobacco pouches (early 19th century, Russia) and accessories woven from beads. Among them is a tea jar made of white matt glass and decorated with an image of a bird on a rowan branch laid out in beads. The jar belonged to the family of L. H. Bodnarevych, a worker of the KhPZ, who received it as a regular tea customer of one firm in Kharkiv in 1909–1910.

Individual items from the “Ceramics, Glass” collection are interesting not only for their form and decor but also for their history; they often belonged to particular people who themselves made history. Let us consider some of them:

• two plates of the Kuznetsov factory from a service that was specially sold during the First World War to raise money for help to tuberculosis patients;
• a small cup that belonged to V. A. Kochetov, rector of Kharkiv University, before him to the Kvitka family, and earlier to the Dupin family, at whose house, according to family archives, Catherine II stayed in 1787 and drank tea from this cup;
• items that belonged to S. I. Vasylkivskyi: a small glass vessel in which a solution for rinsing the eyes was prepared, and two large decorative maiolica dishes;
• items presented to M. F. Sumtsov in 1912: part of a service (2 cups, saucers, a dessert plate, a teapot) decorated by pupils of the Kharkiv Pushkin School to ornaments by S. I. Vasylkivskyi; and a vase sugar bowl, a gift from the Kharkiv professor of ophthalmology L. L. Hirshman;
• a crystal inkwell that belonged to Professor M. P. Trinkler; it was used by the leader of the Kharkiv Bolsheviks, Artem (F. A. Serhieiev), when in 1905 he hid in Trinkler’s hospital disguised as a patient;
• three cups that belonged to the family of M. D. Raievska, founder of the art school in Kharkiv, one of which was given to her by a drawing teacher from Dresden while she studied in Germany; and an artistic miniature on a button in which Raievska depicted the family of her sister Sofia Dmytrivna at the dacha in the Izium district.

Interesting, and perhaps unique, in the collection of the Kharkiv Historical Museum is a wall plate that reminds us of the occupation of Kharkiv during the Second World War. In its centre is a heraldic shield, and along the rim an inscription in Gothic script in German: “We are on the Don/Donets in Kharkiv // Christmas 1942” (translation). Probably this plate is a gift to soldiers of the Wehrmacht army, made specially for Christmas 1942, which they celebrated in conquered Kharkiv. In the author’s view, the history of the making of this item requires further study.

Having examined the museum’s collection of ceramics and glass, one can say that it is of interest not only to researchers but also attracts the attention of museum visitors. These items make it possible to illustrate the development of pottery and ceramic production from the mid-18th to the early 21st century, the everyday life of the population, the symbolic role of tableware and its use in family and calendar rites, and to popularise cultural heritage.