The Attribution of Works of Russian Stonecutting Factories: Object, Design, and Issues of Authorship in the Context of Cross-Cultural Exchange

Abstract

This article focuses on the study of the decorative and applied art of the 19th century — the issue of attribution of authorship in the conditions of borrowing and transfer of taste, active cross-cultural contacts, the cosmopolitan art of the neostyle period, and the establishment of the industrial reproduction of decorative objects based on the principle of replication of a sample. This paper considers a specific source of borrowing (L’art industriel, an engraved album of Leon Feuchère’s drawings, 1839) and the interpretation of three samples from this illustrated edition by Russian masters of stonecutting of the second half of the 19th century. The authors compare the approach towards the original in the works of the Malachite factory of the Demidov family (1847–1851) and the Imperial Kolyvan Polishing Factory, carried out in the 1870s according to the designs of Ivan A. Zlobin. The pieces of art analysed in this article are kept in the Royal Collection of Great Britain (for the first time in history, the authors provide information about two works of Russian masters in the collection), in the Mineralogical Museum of Alexander E. Fersman of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), and Hotêl de Ville (Paris). Additionally, the authors consider sources from the library of Institut national de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Doucet collection) and the collection of the Ministry of the Imperial Court of the Russian State Historical Archive (St Petersburg). Having analysed the aforementioned sources and compared them with graphic prototypes, the authors conclude that it is necessary to complete the existing attribution of the authors of stonecutting works with data about the original artworks. Referring to particular examples, the authors prove that it is impossible to only rely on a narrowly national approach to the history of Russian stonecutting art and that this art should be studied in the European context.

Keywords

• камнерезное искусство
• Колыванская шлифовальная фабрика
• Малахитовая фабрика Демидовых
• кросс-культурные связи
• проблема авторства.