Russian tile as a subject of museum collecting: the stove from the collection of the State Historical Museum

Abstract

This article traces the process of forming in the second part of the 19th century of interest in Russian tile as one of the original phenomena of national culture, reflected in the creation of its museum collections. The Historical Museum, founded in 1883, was amongst the first museums in Russia that established the major collections of tiles. Based on the study of its collection, the interest of researchers headed by I.E. Zabelin developed considering tile not only as a fragment of the decor of the building or of the stove, but as a self-contained art product and a museum item requiring attribution. The author examines the tiled stove of the middle of the 18th century from the SHM collection which is currently on the Moat bell tower of the Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos. The monument was a part of the collection of tiles formed in the first half of the 20th century in the branch of the Historical Museum «Pokrovsky Cathedral», and it has not been previously studied. This collection was transferred to the SHM Department of Ceramics and Glass in 2012, which did not only reveal new attributes of the tiled stove, but also restored the history of the monument. This article first describes the stove in detail, identifies the ratio of the original tiles to the 1920s copies, gives the analogues, and makes a statistical analysis of the painting composition. Although the stove was not included in the inventory of the collection of the famous Russian antique collector P.I. Shchukin in 1905 when the transfer to the Historical Museum took place, nor it was transported to the SHM funds after Shchukin’s death in 1917, detailed examination of unpublished archival documents allowed to attribute the monument with confidence to the Shchukin’s collection.