Kasli casting – the pride and honor of the Russian art industry

The Kasli Foundry or the Plant Town: this is the title which designated a factory settlement in the Perm Governorate (Southern Ural) on an old Russian Empire map. The modern Kasli is known for the famous Kasli Foundry for Architectural and Art Casting (former Kasli Ironworks of the heiresses of merchant L. I. Rastorguyev) which in the second half of the 19th century became a monopolist in industrial manufacturing of various artistic casting items, such as garden furniture, memorial monuments, iconostases, dishware and household items, small-scale sculpture, commemorative medals and reliefs, functional cabinet items. Largely thanks to the Kasli artistic casting, cast iron castings have been forever associated with the term “Russian metal art” which represents an important section of the Russian decorative and applied art of the 19th - 21st centuries.

In the 1840s-1860s, the fundamental artistic traditions of the cast iron artistic casting were formed at the Kasli Foundry. During this time, the artistic item portfolio began to form, the foundry started regular production of chamber (“cabinet”) casting: openwork and relief and planar casting of decorative and functional household items and, most importantly, interior small-scale sculpture. In the 1850s, the foundry started mastering the European artistic casting technique using “dry” lumpy molding which allowed to produce large and small complexly shaped castings of high artistic quality both as individual items and in series. This was particularly beneficial for expanding the portfolio of sculptural plastic art and functional items with plastic decoration. The significantly lower cost of cast iron allowed cast iron items to become a new artistic alternative to expensive items made of gilded and patinated bronze and become available to a wide range of buyers. Different types of items were used as prototypes for cast iron replication at the Kasli Foundry, and they were all the most relevant, fashionable and expressive Western European and Russian decorative and applied art items made of various materials and using various decoration techniques (bronze, spelter, porcelain, cast iron, etc.). The foundry also would sometimes receive a small number of designer patterns by Russian sculptors some of whom worked directly on expanding the artistic casting portfolio.

The Kasli casting gained public attention in the 1860s when the foundry started regularly participating in all major Russian industrial exhibitions and issuing foundry “price lists of cast iron cabinet items” and “Kasli Foundry casting” albums containing information on cast iron items, their prices, sizes and terms of purchase and delivery.

In 1860, the Kasli Foundry received its first gold medal at the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition in Saint Petersburg organized by the Imperial Free Economic Society. In 1870, after receiving a large gold medal at the prestigious Manufacturing Exhibition in Saint Petersburg, the Ural enterprise gained nationwide glory as the best manufacturer of artistic items and, particularly, of cast iron sculpture.

The high artistic and technical level of manufactured items was ensured not only by the professional skills of Kasli workers and the foundry's high-quality technological equipment, but, above all, by the amazing properties of the foundry cast iron. The Kasli Foundry used local molding sands with unique natural qualities and a composition similar to famous German (Brandenburg) sands used in the first half of the 19th century in the production of cast iron items at numerous German foundries and the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in Berlin. It was exactly this circumstance that allowed the foundry to create complex items with a great external surface quality and only minimal deviations of the items’ shapes from the original designer pattern or a ready bronze prototype. The foundry’s workers had a perfect command of the complicated technique of “lumpy molding”, and were amazing founders, chasers and colorers. In the 1870s-1880s, the basic and quite extensive portfolio of interior, decorative and functional household items was formed which represented all art styles of the Historicism period in the Russian art, including one of its most important achievements for the national culture – “the Russian style”. The portfolio of cast iron items available for private orders was constantly expanding and by the early 20th century it was quite extensive. While the 1886 Album “Casting of the Kasli Foundry, Kyshtym District” featured 153 articles (including some artistically decorated household and memorial items), the last catalogue album of 1913 included as many as 759 articles. A Price List of “Medallions and medals” (1896) was issued as a separate Appendix to the Portfolio Album and included 157 articles offered for casting.

In the 1870s - 1890s, a lot of small-scale animalistic sculptures by the most famous Parisian sculptors were cast in iron, including, first and foremost – P.-J. Mêne, as well as sculptural compositions of famous Russian sculptors from Saint Petersburg. The most popular of them among Russian customers were items by Ye. Ye. Lansere “A Cossack's farewell to a Cossack woman”, “Fancy riding Lezgins”, “A troika in the summer”, “Hunters with greyhounds”), N. I. Lieberich (“A countrywoman on a horse with a rake”, “A pointer dog lying”, “Hunting a bear”, “A Lisinsky bear”), P. K. Klodt (“A horse with a horsecloth”, “A horse with a fallen rider”, “A horse with a rider mounting it”, “A Cossack horse”, “A horse guard at the watering place”, etc.), A. L. Ober (“A Kyrgyz on a horse”) which have by now become the classics of the Kasli casting and, in a broader sense, of the whole Russian cast iron chamber casting.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, favorable manufacturing environment and active support of the Kasli Foundry artistic casting development on behalf of the first managers of the Kyshtym plants – G. V. Druzhinin and his son V. G. Druzhinin – inspired the most talented local masters, who had received art education at the foundry school of M. D. Kanayev, to create their own original patterns of chamber sculpture and artistic household items. Such foundry workers as V.F. Torokin (1845-1912), D.I. Shirokov (1872-1937) and K.D. Tarasov (1863-1936) created a wide range of their own sculptures devoted to the subject of labor and representing artistic features of the “Russian style” in its peasant interpretation (ethnographical naturalism). The most famous of these works are “A countryman on plough land” and “An old woman with a spinning wheel” by V. F. Torokin, “An old woman with a box of mushrooms” by D. I. Shirokov, a series of ashtrays in the form of children's dishware by K. D. Tarasov. All such “cabinet” cast iron castings were included in the foundry portfolio in the 1890s and became widely popular in Russia.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Kasli Cast Iron Pavilion (the foundry's stand exhibiting sculptures and cabinet functional items) won the most significant award of the exhibition – Grand Prix “A crystal globe” – and a large gold medal for the Kyshtym Metal Works of the Heiresses of Merchant L. I. Rastorguyev. That was the moment when the Kasli Foundry and its cast iron artistic casting achieved worldwide fame. At this exhibition, European visitors enjoyed not only the sculptures, but also such light, thin, beautifully ornamented with cast decoration and quite robust items as fruit vases, jewelry boxes, watch stands, photo frames and decorative plates which had been cast using German prototypes of the first half of the 19th century.

In the 1880s/90s - 1910s, there were several artisan manufacturers – owners of private furnaces or cast iron foundries, called “small plants” by the locals – in the immediate vicinity of the Kasli Foundry, which also produced artistic (sculpture and functional cabinet items) and memorial casting, dishware and furnace casting. Archive sources indicate their names: S.D. Teplyakov, T.A. Teplyakov, M.N. Timofeyev nicknamed “Demidushka” and G.Ya. Kobelev. The products of the local enterprises are nowadays known under the general term “Kasli casting”. In 1910, the Yekaterinburg Fridman Fast Print House issued a Price List for the cast iron casting of the Kasli foundry of Mikhail Nikitievich Timofeyev and his son which indicates professional approach of such small manufacturers of cast iron artistic casting. All castings of “small Kasli enterprises” featured their own brands with an indication of their owners. Items produced by private furnaces were characterized by high artistic and technical quality, as well as the high quality of black lacquer coating. Apparently, these private foundries, which were small compared to the Rastorguyev Foundry, employed workers which had experience of artistic casting at the main Kasli Foundry or had taken a course at the local foundry school under sculptor M. D. Kanayev in the 1870s-1880s. It is likely that the main patterns of cast iron sculptures and other artistic items were also borrowed from the Kasli Foundry. Nowadays, castings of these private “small Kasli plants” are very rare collectors items.

In the early 21st century, the former Cast Iron Foundry of the Heiresses of Merchant L. I. Rastorguyev changed its name to the Kasli Foundry for Architectural and Art Casting and it continues to function, produce a rather wide range of cast iron and bronze items and participate in various exhibitions as a unique enterprise of one of the Russian art industry branches.