Bas-relief “Portrait of Princess Friederike Luise Charlotte Wilhelmine”

Note

The bas-relief is presented in a rectangular profiled frame with stylized acanthus decoration. The pattern was created for the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in Berlin. Princess Friederike Luise Charlotte Wilhelmine (1798-1860), daughter of King Frederick William III of Prussia (1770-1840), was a wife of the Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich Romanov (1796-1855), who became Emperor of Russia Nicholas I. After December 14, 1825 she became Empress of Russia Alexandra Feodorovna. The bas-relief constitutes a pair with the iron casting “Portrait of Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich Romanov”. The sculptural portrait of the German princess Charlotte is cast together with the ornamented frame gilded over the black paint (similarly to a wooden picture frame with carving and gilding) which indicates the early period of its manufacturing in the first third of the 19th century. The authors of the catalogue titled “Artistic casting of the 19th - 20th centuries in the collection of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts” (Yekaterinburg, “Autograph”, 2005) O. P. Gubkin and G. P. Shaydurova date this cast iron bas-relief (which also features no factory brands) back to 1817-1825 on p. 282 under No. 751 and designate it as an artistic item of the Verkh-Isetsky Plant. At the museum conference in January 2017, O.P. Gubkin, chief expert of the Sverdlovsk regional local history museum, presented the report “Signed and dated castings of the Verkh-Isetsky Plant of the first third of the 19th century in the Russian museum and private collections” in which he expressed a new hypothesis on the origin of such unbranded cast iron relief, which he, based on a number of characteristics, assigned to the early Kasli Foundry production of 1824-1825 (See the materials of the round table scientific conference dedicated to the results of the exhibition “The art arising from fire. The Ural artistic casting of the 18th - 21st centuries” which was held at the Moscow State Integrated Museum-Reserve (Kolomenskoye-Izmailovo-Lyublino) between September 30, 2016 and January 22, 2017 (in print).