Footnotes

Provenance
Jeremy Ltd, London
Private European Collection

For similar examples in the State Historical Museum, Moscow, see L. Dementieva, 18th to 19th century Tula Artistic Steel, Moscow 2015, pl. 112-116, pp. 284-287.


The Imperial Arms Factory, founded in 1712 by Peter the Great in Tula, was established to supply military weaponry. In the eighteenth century, steel articles created by Tula gunsmiths, who primarily supplied the state's fluctuating demand for arms, evolved into a distinctive luxury industry furnishing objects to the rarefied interiors of Pavlovsk Palace from 1786. Catherine the Great patronised yearly Tula Fairs held at Tsarskoe Selo and gifted richly decorated objects to foreign dignitaries, serving to spread the taste for burnished and blued steel with simulated faceted gems, studs and applied gilt foliage afforded by only the wealthiest collectors.

Princess Dashkova, a leading supporter of Catherine the Great, introduced the technique to an English visitor, Martha Wilmot, who lived with the princess from 1803-1808 and likened Tula to Birmingham as a centre for the manufacture of iron. Martha wrote to her parents in 1806: 'Have you found out that the Curiosity from Tula, is a machine for perfuming the rooms! Charcoal is placed in it, & perfumes burn'd, which fume through the Suites of apartments, as the little machine is whisk'd about .. Its office I suppose will now be to lie quietly on the steel chimneypiece, to match which K is to take over a pair of steel Candlesticks, of Tula manufacture likewise' ('The Marchioness of Londonderry and H.M. Hyde,' The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot - 1803-1808, London, 1934, p. 273).

The technique is finely represented with a group of objects from a private European collection. The publication of a catalogue to accompany the 2015 exhibition at the State Historical Museum in Moscow adds further scholarship and provides illustrated examples of similar items that provide broader context for the proposed items.