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All of the Russian Dolls are custom painted by Russian Artist dz013 for Rita's Russian Shop.

Dolls are created in Northern Dvina Traditional Folk Painting style

Northern Dvina peasant painting is an original, striking phenomenon in Russian folk art. Painted household articles were in great demand in Russia. To further boost the demand, the sources they came from were kept secret. And only in 1950, the History and Art Museum of the Zagorsk Reserve organized an expedition to explore the North Dvina area folk painting phenomenon. An effort was to identify the regions and centers where painting was traditional. The expedition succeeded in clarifying and rendering concrete the commonly used but extremely vague term “Northern-Dvina painting”. According to researchers, these paintings can be divided into three major, independent categories or styles – the Rakulka, the Permogorye and the Borok painting. The first category includes the painted woodwork from a number of villages bearing the common name of Mokraya Yedoma in the Krasnoborsk Region, four kilometers away from the Permogorye landing-stage. The characteristic feature of Permogorye painting, as it is generally referred to nowadays, is a narrative composition depicting scenes from everyday peasant life and bordered with a fine foliate pattern on a white background.

In the neighboring Cherevkovo Region further down the river Northern Dvina, the expedition discovered distaffs decorated with a large curving branch painted against a yellow background. The lower part of the distaff blade decorated with the outline of a bird in a square frame. This type of painted decoration originated in the village of Ulyanovskaya in the Cherevkovo Region, a few kilometers away from the place where the river Rakulka flows into the Northern Dvina. Hence, the term “Rakulka painting”.

Still further down the Northern Dvina, you find distaffs of a third type – Borok painting. Similar to Permogorye distaffs in their ornamentation, but they are larger in size, bolder and more decorative in form and more garish in coloring. Characteristic are dazzling white backgrounds and the abundance of gilding. The lower part of the blade invariably depicts an equestrian scene. The expedition discovered this type of painting in the villages of Pervaya Zhelyginskaya, Puchuga and Skobely, situated all along the Northern Dvina, situated on the band of the Northern Dvina some fifteen or twenty kilometers away from each other. It is folk art, and its masters dedicated it to the common man. Its main theme is the life of the common people, rendered in a highly poetic form. It was developed by peasant artists in an effort to impart beauty to the objects used in everyday life.

The earliest specimens of the surviving Permogorye woodwork date back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The artistic traditions of preceding centuries were preserved in the shape and painted decoration of many of them. The 19th-century Mokraya Yedoma craftsmen preferred the same kind of supple twig as the leitmotif of a foliate design to decorate dishes for a festive table. The twig framed a large fish or the fabulous Sirin (bird with a woman’s face) depicted in the center of dish. Most of the white-background painted woodwork embellished with genre scenes, framed in a foliate pattern. Some of the wooden objects were adorned with a series of pictures which, taken together, told a single story. There is usually a certain topic, too, behind compositions with figures of men and animals incorporated in foliate patterns.

The larger the object to paint, the greater was the possibility for a craftsman to tell a detailed story of peasant life. For instance, the cradle exhibited in the Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad is decorated with eleven different genre compositions depicting man’s life from his birth well into maturity.Beautifully decorated distaffs predominate among the surviving specimens of 19th-century painted woodwork from Permogorye. An indispensable implement, the distaff played an important role in the life of peasant women and certain parts of the marriage ceremony were connected with it. Distaffs were embellished with special care.