The woman with a jug-whistle was sculpted by the hereditary craftswoman Natalia Goncharova in 2001. Usually, she worked together with her sister Olga: one of them would design the shape of a toy and the other would paint the clay item after it had been fired. However, Natalia Mikhailovna created this toy on her own –unfortunately, her sister had already died by that time.

Natalia and Olga Goncharova revived the craft of the Stary Oskol clay toy after all the upheavals of the twentieth century: the revolution, the famine in the Volga region, the Great Patriotic War. They were hereditary craftswomen who worked the longest — more than 20 years. They learned how to sculpt old figurines from their mother Anastasia Goncharova. After the death of their parents, the girls, together with their elder sister Evdokia, continued selling products on the market for several more years. “Life itself forced us to make toys”, Evdokia Mikhailovna said, “In the summer it was still possible to get hired to work in the filed, in the fall we would make dung cakes from animal manure. And in the winter we would make toys”. In 1936, all the sisters took different jobs and did not practice the craft of making clay toys for many years.

In 1985, the art critic Mikhail Nikitin came to Stary Oskol. He asked the artists to make a batch of toys. People’s Master of the Belgorod region Natalia Nikishina said that the sisters did not agree at first:

So, the Stary Oskol clay toy appeared at the All-Russian exhibition ‘Folk Pottery of Russia’ in 1987. After that, the sisters began to make traditional toys for different museums and private collectors.

It is noteworthy that until the twentieth century it was not customary to paint the faces of toys. Since old times, it was believed that a figurine with a painted face could accidentally turn out to look like someone who the artist might know. And if something bad happens to the toy (for example, it breaks), then the same misfortune awaits the person. By the end of the twentieth century, the toys began to imitate the items produced at factories — the artisans had to start painting the faces of women and Cossacks figurines. The Goncharovs put two black dots (eyes) on the doll’s face and drew two arcs above them (eyebrows). A small red dot marked the mouth. Usually they used a natural color palette.