About the artistic casting collection

Any private collection has its own distinctive identity, a unique biography and a history full of interesting moments, highlights, unexpected discoveries and successful acquisitions. By pure accident, the collection started with a gift — an interesting item which inspired the owner to collect rare and valuable Kasli artistic casting items.

This collection is one of the best among Russian private and museum collections in artistic quality, style diversity, systematic selection and quality of item preservation.

All items have undergone thorough expert authentication, visual art expert analysis and comparison with analogues from museum collections, because authenticity and a high level of artistic and technical production quality have always been a crucial criteria for selection of cast iron articles. The collection features rarities and items of cultural, historical and museum significance.

Kasli cast iron artistic casting is nowadays recognized as the pride and honor of the Russian art industry and applied art of the 19th — early 21st centuries.

About cast iron

A large number of fabulous cast iron interior sculptures and the perfection of their plastic art, the elegant fragility and stylishness of decorative cast iron vases, the precise elegance of decorative openwork items, the brutal beauty along with the light visual patterns of cast iron furniture, the miniature size of chess pieces — all of that contradicts the traditional perception of cast iron as a rough industrial and construction material.

Upon closer examination of pre-revolutionary and Soviet-time Kasli casting items, you see that cast iron artistic casting is true art, and it is based on the high professional skills of sculptors and the talented hands of Ural workers who embodied these images in metal.

The collection’s structure

The collection can be divided into several large groups — interior sculpture, various cabinet and household utility items, garden furniture, fireplace accessories, kitchenware.

Within these groups the museum’s exposition includes genre collections, and the most wide ranges of artistic items belong to such sections as «Busts», «Groups», «Sculpture», «Figurines», «Writing materials», «Home decoration». Some of the rarest items or items with only few copies preserved are the cast iron openwork furniture and cast iron chess sets «The Russians and the Turks» and «The Prussians and the French».

A real rarity and the earliest cast iron item is a bas-relief «Portrait of Princess Friederike Luise Charlotte Wilhelmine depicting a young Alexandra Feodorovna, the future wife of Emperor of Russia Nicholas I, before she got married. The bas-relief, which was cast by founders in 1824-1825 using a 1816 pattern of a famous Austrian medalist and sculptor Leonard Posch, who had created it for the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in Berlin, shows a high quality of relief and planar casting during the earliest period of production of artistic items at the Kasli Foundry.

Other items include a large literary series of main characters of works by Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Cervantes, Goethe, etc. Such figures and compositions have been depicted in metal as «Plyushkin», «Nozdryov», «Manilov», «Solokha and the devil», , «The Prisoner of the Caucasus», «A Zaporozhian Cossack with a witch», «The Demon». The interior pair «Don Quixote» and «Mephistopheles», deserves special mention as it symbolises the Good and the Evil.

The cast iron casting collection has a lyrical and emotional element represented by castings depicting nude female figures. Among them are the figures of «Bather women»: the creators of their patterns consciously made them visually similar to the Greek Aphrodite or the Roman Venus, a goddess of love who since the ancient times has been considered a symbol of female beauty and eternal youth. Items depicting scenes from classical mythology, ancient history and Bible stories include such amazing works of «cast iron art» created using Western European patterns and prototypes as sculptures «Ariadne», «Venus on dolphins», «Paris», «Apollo Belvedere», «Diana with a deer», paired sculptures «Mercury» and «Fortuna», «Ruth», «Iphigenia».

One of the central places in the Gallery’s large-scale interior plastic art is occupied by the figures of cast iron dwarves belonging to the medieval German and Scandinavian mythology. They clearly symbolize the mining and metallurgical industry in sculpture. The composition «Dwarves on a cliff holding a mining and metallurgical coat of arms», which is small in size and very rare on the antique market, looks like a miniscule miniature among them. This group imitates an emblem on the cover of the «Mountain Journal» of the 1870s — 1890s, the oldest Russian periodical publication in the mining sphere.

The collection’s animalistic items include sculptures and figurines mostly depicting various domestic and wild animals. Before 1917, the Kasli castings of «A Lisinsky bear» used to feature a scale with metric figuring and a commemorative inscription on one of the edges of the stand: «Убитѣ государемѣ Императоромѣ близ Лисино 9 марта 1865 года» (Killed by His Majesty the Emperor near Lisino on March 9, 1865). Legend has it that this sculpture by N. I. Lieberich shows a personal trophy of Alexander II shot when the emperor was hunting in the forests of the Lisinkaya state dacha near Saint Petersburg. This is the first collection featuring such a wide range of collective cast iron items, which are so rare on the antique market and include interior decorative vases and openwork items (photo frames, watch stands, wall-mounted plates, boxes and jewelry box, etc.) making metal items seem light and fragile and indicating the highest skills of the sophisticated technique of their manufacturing. The most interesting cast iron items of the pre-revolutionary period are items which can very rarely be preserved in good condition and full configuration, including lighting fixtures, inkwells, stamps for letters, letter and paper knives, sculptural matchbox holders and some household accessories.

Finally, you can trace the development and the continuation of traditions of the Kasli Foundry artistic casting in the 20th — early 21st centuries thanks to a rather wide range of items cast during the Soviet period of the Kasli Foundry manufacturing, starting with the 1920s — 1930s.

It is important to mention such exclusive items, not presented in other private and museum collections, as a 1975 group sculpture «A group of steel workers» produced using a designer pattern by a Chelyabinsk sculptor B. A. Maganov and an anniversary sculpture «An iron ore miner and a steel worker» cast in 2016.