A pair of Russian black marble tazze by the Ekaterinburg Imperial Lapidary Works, circa 1840

RELATED LITERATURE

N. M. Mavrodina, The Art of Russian Stone Carvers 18th-19th Centuries, St. Petersburg, 2007

Vases of this large scale were produced in the imperial lapidary works as commissions for the imperial palaces or for the Tsars to send as diplomatic gifts and rarely appear on the market. Of an intense black, the sharp and elegant design of these tazze is very close to one vase drawing in the Imperial State Archive.

A similar example was sold at Sotheby's, London, STONE, 4 December 2019, lot 19.

Stonecutting in Russia

The Russians were aided by the discoveries of rich deposits of semi-precious stones in the Urals and further east in Siberia. Towards the end of the 18th century, blocks of Korgon, porphyry, rhodonite, Kalgan and Aushkul jasper and Nevianok marble were quarried and sent to St. Petersburg to be cut and polished into objects.

The Imperial government and Peter the Great established the first factory at Peterhof, near St Petersburg, in 1721, employing Italian craftsmen who trained Russian craftsmen. Subsequently, the administration set up further factories at Ekaterinburg (in 1765) and Kolyvan in the Urals where the locally trained stone cutters could work larger pieces of stone. These were active through the third quarter of the 19th century.