Album of original mural and embroidery designs.

with 60 original watercolours

A unique and important album of original Ukrainian Petrykivka and embroidery designs from the 1920s.

This is an exceptional record of folk paintings from different areas around Ukraine drawn by an unknown hand and captioned in German. The majority of the watercolours are traditional ornamental mural designs, for these the village is noted as well as where in the house they are found such as 'between the windows in the hut' or 'above the stove'. The embroidery designs are annotated with notes such as, 'according to patterns from the 18th century' and the regions (or peoples) where the style originates from such as 'from the foot of the Carpathians', Pokuttia, Lviv region, Polesia, Bukovyna and the Hutsul. There are also a few patterns for men's shirts which are described by the artist as '[my] own design'.

The sixty incredible watercolours are all exceptionally bright and display a broad range of styles, showing the differences between the regions. Many are intrinsically important to Ukrainian heritage such as the Derevo Zhyttia [Tree of Life], poppies and geometric patterns. Most of the villages featured are either near Uman in Cherkasy or in the Dnipropetrovsk region, with a few in Kyiv. Two are from the village of Petrykivka which is where the tradition of mural painting originated. The decorative painting style which dates back to the 18th century was common in many villages of the Dnipropetrovsk region (as well as other regions of Ukraine) but it was most prevalent and developed in Petrykivka and so the style as a whole is referred to Petrykivka painting, or simply Petrykivka. The paintings largely feature floral forms but there are also birds and one featuring figures playing traditional instruments. They are all two-dimensional as is characteristic, and the flowers and petals never overlap each other, often coming off individual stems. Petrykivka designs did adapt and change according to artistic trends of the time and these drawings are clearly influenced by the styles of the 1910s and 20s.

From the beginning of the 20th century artists and researchers began to look at folk art in a different light and wanted to take inspiration from it as well as conserve it. In 1911 the ethnographer Dmytro Yavornytsky began to collect samples of murals which would form the basis of an exhibition in St Petersburg in 1913. Research continued in to the 1920s and this album is one such example of an expedition to record murals in order to document what is a semi-ephemeral art form as the paintings would have to be repainted every year if not every six months. The wooden buildings which the paintings adorn as well as the traditional stoves (pechi) often have not survived and so this collection of such a broad range of designs from across the country and early on in the Soviet period is an incredible piece of Ukrainian heritage.

Landscape album (21.5 × 31.5 cm); 22 sheets with 60 watercolour drawings on thick paper pasted on, some with gold, captioned in German, one leaf is dated 1926, some very minor scattered foxing and age toning to margins, oak leaf patterened endpapers; contemporary Ukrainian leatherette binding with leaf pattern banner, in near fine condition.