Russian Arts and Crafts Copper Beaten Vessel

I walked past this at GW thinking it was one of those cheap steel containers that someone had left outside. I came back through and thought ah well I actually like the look of it for Halloween/fall decor (it was pre-filled with cobwebs!). I picked it up and it weighed a ton. Confused, I checked the mark on the bottom...Russian Imperial mark with Cyrillic words.

One lens search later and the internet compared it to all the Russian Stickley Bros. Arts and Crafts pieces from 1905-1915ish (though I of course assume this one was not sold through them as it's lacking their mark). It didn't look much like copper (it was covered in a white film) but it sure weighed like it... For $5 I'd find out, and it would go in my witch decor if not.



One gentle clean later... yeah, copper and brass ha haaa.



I love the handle details and the interesting seam.







So anyone know Russian? It doesn't look like the Tula mark and I'm no good making the translators work with Cyrillic. Stats: 9.5" (24.13 cm) and 1 lb 13 oz (.82 kg).

And here I told the husband we needed to take a break from thrifting to do other things. Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in.

 

This looks like the same mark ...
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1317863830/extraordinary-rare-19th-century-imperial

 

I can't read it either, but for cheap and feeling like copper...it's outta there.

 

Not yet finding a site that details Russian copper marks. But here's a side by side of your's and the etsy link ...

 

ФАБРИКА = Factory
And I can't read the rest

 

Next letter seems to be a В, so ФАБРИКА is possibly followed by ВѢ, like the mark in this thread
https://www.antiquers.com/threads/copper-vase-identification.34902/
Not seeing the ТУЛА part in your mark, as that last part is really illegible

 

Great find, mirana, great price too.

That's what they do, those sneaky antiques. And this time it is definitely a Russian plot.

 

Nice find and certainly sought by A&C collectors, even without any Stickley provenance.

 

Good eye spotting that Mirana! It cleaned up beautifully!

 

Thank you!

Thanks for putting work into this! I've found quite a few stamps but none yet that exactly match this one. If the word we can see means "Factory" then that takes many out of the equation for "maybe same maker, different stamp" haaa.

Thanks so much for the translation!! It may be that it's just a Tula / ТУЛА area mark after all. I don't know if they were made in other areas and stamped for them.

Thank you! And YES ha haa it's the worst. At least I don't have to go as far as some to my hunting grounds, and my husband is happy to be a partner to it (he just adopts all the books and CDs....).

Really? Well that's nice to hear. It's definitely not as pristine as what a dealer may offer. The interior I ran out of steam for after the first few washes lol. I admit I like Art Nouveau more (like everyone else) but I do like Arts and Crafts too. It's great to have a piece of it.

Thank you! My arm hurts from cleaning. I spared everyone the reverse where someone stuck a piece of plastic tape that resulted in a very shiny not-oxidized rectangle lol.

 

I think you are correct. I think that is the entire second word, and in modern Russian there would be just a В (pronounced like V in English). That word means "in" so the first part means something like "factory in" or "the factory is in" And so the part that is unreadable is probably a town or regional name.

(For those who don't know, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, but studied it for a while.)

 

Thank you for the interesting insight on it!

 

For those who don't know, I'm not a native speaker of Russian, and never studied it.
I used Google Translate

 

That's better than me. I just couldn't get it to work at all lol.

 

That works well, up to a point! I use it a lot.

 

Maybe you've done this, but... if you search "Russian keyboard" a couple of good options will come up where you can click to have the Russian letters come up in a box, and then copy and paste into Google Translate. That usually works. However, since that symbol after the B on your piece is not in the current Russian alphabet, not sure if that will work or not. It was one of the letters/symbols that the Bolsheviks abolished when they reformed the alphabet.

 

Google Translate also has that keyboard option
After selecting Russian as source language, you'll see Ру at the bottom right of the field for the source language. If you click on the arrow next to that, you'll get a dropdown menu, that includes an icon of a keyboard. Click on that, and you'll get:


You then need to click in the source language field again, to be able to use the keyboard, as Google Translate apparently doesn't understand that if you select the keyboard option, you actually want to use it to write something in that field ....

The keyboard option is also available for many other languages

 

Thank you, Marote! I didn't know that. I'll try it sometime.