European Porcelain in Russian Regional Collections: Attribution Problems

For the most part, the museum network of modern Russia formed in the first decades of the USSR. At the time, works from nationalized collections of considerable size were distributed on a large scale and somewhat chaotically among the already existing and mostly capital museums and newly created regional ones. This factor had a significant impact on the formation of the composition of most regional collections, and seriously affected the specifics of registering items such as those made of porcelain and the peculiarities of specialists’ access to them. Thus, the collection of porcelain of Western European production of the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts has around two hundred items. Despite the relatively modest number, it will nevertheless help one get sufficiently acquainted with the main trends in the development of porcelain in European countries between the eighteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. The history of its formation demonstrates the main trends in the replenishment of collections in the Soviet years. For many decades, namely, from the moment of the establishment of the museum in 1936 until the early 2010s, the collection in question remained practically unstudied, which was largely due to the lack of specialists characteristic of many regional museums of that time, as well as the low availability of sources for comparing and typologizing the works stored in the collections. Referring to the collection of the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, the article considers the main problems associated with the study of regional collections of European porcelain: the fragmented provenance of artworks transferred from nationalized collections in the first decades of the museum’s development; the complex format of working with private collections due to the specifics of the socio-political system of the Soviet state which did not welcome private collecting; insufficient attention to the marks on the artworks, which can confuse an inexperienced researcher, and, as a result, the urgent need for a significant updating and addition of porcelain marks to the currently existing reference books.