Fedoskino

Visit to a Russian village "Fedoskino", It is a center of Russian folk art lacquer miniature painting on papier mache boxes.
The village of Fedoskino, situated 40km north of Moscow on the picturesque banks of the Ucha River, is Russia's oldest centre of lacquer miniature painting. At least half of the inhabitants of this village and the neighboring ones are in one way or another connected with the traditional craft. The secrets of making and painting papier-mache lacquers have for 200 years now been passed from one generation to another. The French word "papier-mache" (literally "chewed paper") is well-rooted in the Russian language. Several layers of pasted cardboard, boiled in linseed oil and then repeatedly dried in a hot oven, form an original material - hard as wood, light and waterproof - that can be sawed, polished, primed and lacquered. In the 18lh through the 19lh century papier-mache was widely used to make sundry items from peaks for the Russian army headdress to trays, tables and even chandeliers. Needless to say, all sorts of papier-mache caskets and boxes used to store matches, stamps, cards, glasses and above all snuff were immensely popular.

Pyotr Korobov's factory was the first in the Moscow region. According to legend, Korobov went to Germany to visit Johann Stobwasser's factory in Braunschweig and brought back round painted snuffboxes to serve as models. The first trademark appeared on the factory products under Pyotr Lukutin, Korobov's son-in-law who inherited the factory in 1824. His trademark consisted of the letters "F. P. L." which stood for "Factory Pyor Lukutin." From that time and throughout the 19th century until the factory was closed in 1904, the Lukutin family owned the factory. In 1828, Pyotr Lukutin was conferred the right to stamp his products with the state emblem. The double-headed Russian eagle thus appeared next to the "F. P. L." initials.

Alongside plain, mass-produced items intended for the public at large and supplied to trade rows or shops, the Lukutin factory also made things to order intended for wealthy merchants and the aristocracy. Executed with rare craftsmanship and delicacy, those products brought fame to Lukutin's artisans in the first half of the 19th century.Miniature painting was also on the rise in the applied arts, especially porcelain painting (Gardner's porcelain factory, which was located comparatively not far from Fedoskino, is worth mentioning in this connection), in which genre scenes and pictures of peasant and round dances were in vogue, together with portraits and landscapes. Lukutin's papier-mache lacquer miniatures were well-attuned to their time. Their conventional black background, small size, planar composition, romantic and allegorical scenes or sentimental portraits met perfectly well the aesthetic criteria of the age