A Rare Early Soviet Porcelain Plate after a Design by Boris Kustodiev. Kornilov Porcelain Factory, Petrograd, after 1920 ...

Description

A Rare Early Soviet Porcelain Plate after a Design by Boris Kustodiev
Kornilov Porcelain Factory, Petrograd, after 1920
12-1/4 inches (31.1 cm)

PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, New York.


In 1835, St. Petersburg merchant M.V. Kornilova founded a porcelain factory on the Neva's right bank, which she managed together with her five sons. Within eight years, it earned the Imperial Warrant as supplier to the court. The Kornilov Brothers' factory became arguably that largest private porcelain manufacturers in Russia with Mikhail Kornilov at its head. He became sole owner in 1869, and the company passed to his widow and children after his death. During the right of the last emperor, the Kornilov factory produced very fine works on the pan-Slavic style. The enterprise did not survive the revolution. Nationalized in 1918, under Soviet authority the factory struggled; the work produced for the Imperial court, aristocratic and bourgeois clients vanished. By 1919, the firm was producing very few pieces at all due to the war and the revolution.

This early Soviet work is a rare highlight of the end of the famous Kornilov Factory. Based on the watercolor "Waiter" by Boris Kustodiev (painted on 1920, and now in the collection of the Joseph Brodsky Apartment-Museum, St. Petersburg) the abstracted floral borders and image of a cheerful laborer may have been a last attempt of the factory to align with Bolshevik imagery, but it did not help. In 1921, the factory was shuttered and re-equipped in 1921 to produce industrial electrical porcelain fixtures.



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