Gzhel Porcelain and pottery from Russia

Gzhel is the name of a major ceramics center situated some fifty kilometers southeast of Moscow. The village of Gzhel is mentioned for the first time in the fourteenth century in the testament of Ivan Kalita the Moneybag, the Grand Prince of Muscovy. Otherwise historical chronicles note that the dominant pursuit of the local population was the making of pottery, for which reason the very name of Gzhel derives in all likelihood from the Russian verb zhech which means burn in the sense of firing clay. Though the secrets of the craft were handed down from generation to generation long before, Gzhel really rose to fame as a large center of ceramics in the eighteenth century when local potters mastered the making of majolica or majolica tin-glazed earthenware, which owes sonbriguet to the island of Majorca, where these ceramic wares were made.

At that time majolica wares were called in Russia tsenina. The origin of the word is not known exactly. Majolica wares were termed in Europe faience. The product was usually made of tinted clays, had a massive porous shell, and was decorated with enamel colours in polychromatic, typically peasant-style designs. True, tsenina was first manufactured in Moscow at the establishment of the merchant Afanasy Grebenshchikov, who employed a number of potters from Gzhel. Returning home and having learned the secrets of majolica manufacture, they started their own potteries. Though we have no idea who they were-their names have been lost - they made so fine a start that within the space of but several years, Gzhel majolica was already successfully competing with Grebenshchikov's produce.

Whereas the celebrated Italian Renaissance majolica borrowed subject material from contemporary painting and served an exclusively decorative purpose (produced mostly were large vases, giant dishes and bas-reliefs), Gzhel ware was, on the contrary, of utilitarian shape and form and was decorated with the two-dimensional designs that are typically of folk origin; the large local pools of bright color displayed a marked affinity with the lubok, the Russian folk picture or broadside.

The range of Gzhel majolica included virtually the entire assortment of domestic utensils, such as breakfast and soup plates, dinner-services, mugs, tankards, and pitchers. More often that was only white-glazed earthenware devoid of decoration; however it was prized precisely because of its hygienic whiteness.