Russian Furntiure

Publishers Note :Soon after her arrival in Russia in 1744 the future Catherine the Great lamented the pitiful scarcity of furniture in the imperial palaces. Within less than a hundred years those palaces, and the grandiose apartments which sprang up alongside them in the burst of building activity that gripped Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, were filled with magnificent furniture, as befitted their sumptuous decor. Russia had enjoyed a cultural renaissance, in which the skills of decorative artists were nurtured as never before, and out of this ferment emerged an autonomous Russian style, distinguished by its exhilarating freedom of expression and ornamentation, its exceptional diversity of forms and materials, and the dazzling virtuosity of its craftsmanship.This period and the flamboyant style it engendered have only recently excited interest in the west; literature on the subject is not only scarce but also largely in Russian. Russian Furniture - the culmination of many years' research in the Soviet Union and the west - is therefore valuable as the first comprehensive study in English of the development and evolution of Russian furniture styles during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Some 335 photographs in colour and black and white illustrate the text, many of them specially commissioned in the Soviet Union and never before seen in the West. They demonstrate the skill of the gifted Russian craftsmen, while contemporary watercolours provide an insight into the rare warmth and charm of the interiors. Together text and photographs combine to present a lavish portrait of this important era in the history of Russian decorative art.