Ramensky district,
Ramensky region
-
Object
-
Type of arts & crafts
-
Technique
-
MediumFaience
-
Geography details
Village Gzhel,
Ramensky district,
Ramensky region -
Federal region today
-
Federal subject today
-
DateLate 18th mid 19th centuries
-
Type of sourcephoto album “Gzhel. Ceramics of the 18th–19th Centuries. Ceramics of the 20th Century”
Author(s) T. Astrakhantseva, T. Dulkina, N. Grigorieva
-
Gzhel wares are decorated by means of transfer printing. The print captured the potter’s fancy not becouse of any bright colouring – in fact they were nearly always black, with blue or green far and few between – but, primarily, becouse of the mood that a landspace steeped in a romantic haze always generated. The fantasied, unconcretized landspace held pride of place in Gzhel faience. It was conventional, stattic and glamourized and was intended to evoke feelings of peaceful bliss. To some degree it accorded with the Romantic trends in the art of the 1820s and 1830s. The transfer-printing decoration brings together in a most fanciful way deverse buildings with domes, turrets and colonnades, arched bridges, castles and fortresses; meanwhile, scenes are populated with horsement, pilgrims, and elegantly garbed ladies and gallants. These idealized landscape scenes did not derive from the imagination of Gzhel’s self-taught engravers but were borrowed from English cream-coloured earthenware that was imported in bulk into Russian.
