Lyudmila Nikolayevna Vysotskaya completed the displayed decorative composition “The Nutcracker” in 2020. Mounted on a two-tiered pedestal is the figure of the character from the fairy-tale by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. The Nutcracker is placed in the center of the top tier of the pedestal. His right hand with a sword is extended forward, while his left hand is slightly raised and clenched into a fist.
The Nutcracker’s headdress is a double-cornered hat with a feather on the front right side. On the back of the figure are the curls of a wig falling down the back, covered by a cloak. They are tied together with a ribbon in a bow.
The artist created a composition using different types of amber, which the Kaliningrad region is rich in. She fixed a suede lining under the rectangular amber base and arranged low rectangular legs made of the same mineraloid at the four corners. Ludmila Nikolaevna Vysotskaya laid each tier of the pedestal with different-sized rectangular pieces of amber plates in the gold leaf mosaic technique.
From 1991, Lyudmila Vysotskaya worked for two decades at the factory in her native village of Yantarny, and then she moved to Kaliningrad, where she started working in a private workshop. A few years later, Lyudmila Vysotskaya started working on amber as an individual artist.
The image for this sculpture was borrowed from the Christmas story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. The German writer first published this work in the collection “Children’s Fairy Tales” in 1816 in Berlin, later the Nutcracker appeared in the 1819 book “The Serapion Brothers”.
In 1851, a story called
“The Nutcracker King and Poor Reynold” appeared. It was written by Heinrich
Hoffmann, a German doctor, psychiatrist and writer. According to the story, an
angel appears to a boy from a poor family living in a shack and invites him to
celebrate Christmas in a magical land of toys, ruled by the Nutcracker King,
who travels on a wooden horse. It was this story that inspired the carpenter
Friedrich Wilhelm Füchtner, who is considered the father of wooden nutcrackers.
In 1870, he began mass production of the popular souvenirs on a machine.
