Bolshevik era plate found in cupboard sells for £8k
AN old plate from the Russian Revolution has sold for £8,000 at auction after being discovered in the back of a wardrobe wrapped in a tea towel.
The 10-inch dish was hand-painted in 1921, four years after the Bolsheviks rose to power under Vladimir Lenin.
Under the new regime, the Imperial Porcelain Factory was taken over and they started reproducing Communist designed crockery with the leftover porcelain blanks.
The plates were decorated with propaganda slogans and revolutionary images as a symbol of rebellion against the toppled aristocracy.
It was found in a house clearance in Stratford-upon-Avon by staff at Bigwood Fine Art Auctioneers.
It ended up selling for £8,000, after being cautiously estimated at £60, to a bidder in Eastern Europe this month.
Mark Ashley, a Senior Valuer and Auctioneer, said: “The Russian plate was white porcelain, which was made for the Imperial factories.
“The Tsar would have had all this commissioned for the palaces and aristocracy. With the revolution in 1917, workers got hold of the plates, the blanks, and then hand-painted them with hammers, sickles and things to do with revolutionary symbolism. So we did a little bit of research and found that there were some sort of reproduction ones making about £50.
“You have to be very careful because we’re not specialists in Russian plates.
“Could it be a reproduction and someone just got any old white plate and put a few hand-painted symbols on it?
“With the internet, you put it out there then really let the market find the value.
“We did think it would make a few hundred but the beauty of the internet is it goes out and all the right collectors and dealers get interested. “It could be people who operate out of a gallery in Moscow and the beauty of the internet is they pick up on it. A fight ensued for it to take it up to £8,000, which was fantastic.” Mark, who has over 30 years of experience and has appeared as one of the experts for the BBC series Bargain Hunt, also found a Ruskin vase in the property which sold for £5,500.
A slogan on the back of the plate translates as “All who are bold and young of heart should take up the book, a sickle and a hammer”
The base includes the green imperial cypher of Nicholas II, dating back to 1902, along with the painter’s initials and name in Cyrillic. Mark added: “There are other examples and they have become very collectable. Some are in museums because it’s the whole story of the workers overturning the past.
“They took something that represented imperial power and made it their own. They would have been very expensive plates, plain white porcelain plates.
“They would have been really expensive pieces of kit and only affordable for the aristocracy. It’s subverting that by hand painting your crude images.
“It is almost sort of graffiti really. It is psychologically making a statement against the past power as well and it then became very decorative. It’s a bit like how people wanted a piece of the Berlin Wall when it went down. People do want to collect things that are part of history.”