Articles

Alexandre Bigot became one of the greatest artists in the arts and crafts, the brightest star in the Art Nouveau epoch - an example of how engaging in a favorite business can bring unprecedented success and glory, make a person and the result of his work a part of the global cultural heritage.

We would like to tell you about the Abramtsevo ceramic workshop, which was owned by the famous industrialist and philanthropist Savva Mamontov and which was later turned into the Abramtsevo Factory.

Savva Mamontov's Abramtsevo factory inspired many artists and lead to the emergence of several ceramic enterprises. One of such enterprises was the Murava Artel (where ‘artel’ means a cooperative association of craftsmen) founded in 1904 by Alexei Vasilyevich Filippov.

When we wrote our material on Arabic ceramics, which truly became the mother of modern ceramic art and majolica, we could not help but pay attention to even more ancient ceramic works of Mesopotamia, the Sumerian civilization that existed in the territory of modern Iraq for more than two and a half thousand years.

The concept of majolica in our minds is strongly associated with Italy, although it is a known fact that the word itself came from the name of the Spanish island of Mallorca, from where glazed products from Spain were brought to Italy. In general, Italians, like other Europeans, began to use glaze in their ceramics much later.

We want to devote this article to Art Nouveau tiled stoves. We write a lot about the Art Nouveau style, because we consider it the embodiment of the harmony of life, the last frontier between nature and the expansion of scientific and technological progress of the 20th -21st centuries.

A fireplace in English architecture is of no small importance. The Foggy Albion became ‘foggy’ not only because of the abundance of rain in the marine climate, but also because of the smog of fireplaces, which were in absolutely every room of the house and served as the only source of heat.

The end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries was accompanied by the flourishing of the Art Nouveau era in all European countries. Finland was no exception, giving rise to its own modern style of ‘national romanticism’.

The authorship of the majority of the surviving antique tiled stoves and fireplaces belonged to workshops of brothers Carl and Ernst Teichert, who also branded their produce with the city name Meissen

This small article is intended not so much to tell as to show the remarkably beautiful ceramic murals on the facades of European cities.

This article is dedicated to European antique tiled stoves preserved in numerous castles scattered across the picturesque hills of Europe. The story will tell about the tiled stoves of the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Austria and Lithuania.

The Russian tiled stoves is a unique and self-sufficient phenomenon. The stove in the Russian house has always been a “thing in itself” - everything began and ended on it, it was the alpha and omega of any house, many beliefs and legends were associated with it

At the end of the 19th century, the Arts and Crafts movement was born in Great Britain. Arts & Crafts, which later became widespread in many countries of the world, was the starting point for the Art Nouveau style.

In 1900, a significant event took place, the Paris World Exhibition, in which products from Russia made a splash. Critics and the press were beside themselves describing the pavilion of the Russian Empire, which was the largest at the exhibition and occupied more than 24 thousand square meters.

Antonio Gaudi revealed his talent for drawing very early, but what a more surprising fact was that as a child he constantly noticed unusual things. In particular, at the age of seven, he told his father in great surprise that the sea waves did not repeat, their silhouette was different all the time.

We would like to talk about a French ceramist of the Renaissance - Bernard Palissy - a French potter, enameller, painter, glazier and ceramist, as well as a writer and a great scientist, whose works are exhibited in the National Renaissance Museum in Château d'Écouen, and are also presented in the Louvre and the Hermitage.

In Russia, the period of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, which bears the beautiful name Silver Age, became the era of an extraordinary creative upsurge in our culture as a whole, a time of outstanding artistic discoveries and the appearance of many masterpieces of music, theater, visual and decorative and applied art.

We have already been writing about the English ceramic fireplaces of the Georgian era also referred to as the Regency era (1714-1830), however English ceramics has a longer history starting from the end of the 16th century, from the era of Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.

The art-tile industry in the United States was initially inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, which evolved from the decorative English art.

The Delft masters’ tiles were so popular that they began to be copied, and this way of decorating the interior was called delftware. Almost to this day, tiles in southern Europe are called ‘majolica’, and in northern Europe ‘delftware’.