"Teremok" Armchair (Primary Title)
Abramtsevo Carpentry Workshop, Russian, active 1876 - 1930s (Cabinetmaker)
Sergei Maliutin, Russian, 1859 - 1937 (Designer)
This armchair is one of the masterpieces designed by Sergei Maliutin and made at the Abramtsevo Carpentry Workshop founded in 1876. The artist colony of Abramtsevo and a similar colony at Talashkino are the most celebrated kustar (folk craft) institutions of early 20th-century Russia. This museum’s armchair is among the very first pieces of furniture designed by Maliutin after he left Talashkino. Made for a teremok, a rustic cottage or tower inspired by Russian fairy tales, it is prominently decorated with a firebird, a magical flying creature, as well as spindles, ships on water, dragons or serpents, a face, stylized horses as armrests, floral motifs, and other carved details.
общества архитекторов художников, Выпуск 3, 1908 [Yearbook of the society of
architects-artists. St. Petersburg, 1908, vol. 3, p. 82];
Photograph of the armchair: Художественная промышленность, выпуск 1, 1915
(Art Industry, Moscow, 1915, vol. 1, page 38)
Photograph of the design for the armchair: Ежегодник московского
архитектурного общества, 1914-1916, вып. 4, Москва, 1917, с. 59 [Yearbook of
the Moscow architectural society, 1914 - 1916, vol. 4, Moscow, 1917, p. 59];
Russkoe dekorativnoe iskusstvo deviatnatsatyi-nachalo dvadtsatogo veka [Russian
decorative art of the 19th-early 20th centuries, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1965), fig. 45,
p.70]
Wendy Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar
Industries 1870-1917 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p. 123, fig. 40
Jesco Oser, “Rodnik”: A Source of Inspiration,” in: Experiment 18 (2012), pp. 61-
88
________, Талашкино. Деревянные изделия мастерской кн. М.Кл.Тенишевой
[Talashkino: Objects in Wood from the Workshops of Princess M. Kl. Tenisheva,
2016, Moscow, p. 638, no. 742].
Some object records are not complete and do not reflect VMFA's full and current knowledge. VMFA makes routine updates as records are reviewed and enhanced.
