Covered with glaze, the painted jug is made of red clay. The terracotta background has a contrasting dark green décor, applied with broad freehand strokes. The neck of the jug is decorated with two bands of ribbon-like ornament of wavy and arched lines. The body is painted with large S-shaped scrolls.

Such ceramics was made in the village of Sukhoi Karsun in the Karsun district of the Ulyanovsk region. The settlement was founded in 1747. By the middle of the 19th century, thanks to high-quality clay reserves, it became a center of pottery not only in the Karsun district, but also in the entire Simbirsk province. Karsun inhabitants provided a large number of towns and villages of neighboring provinces with pottery, took their goods beyond the Volga, where they exchanged them for grain.

There was a saying in Sukhoi Karsun:

Local craftsmen worked on their own potter’s wheels at home. With the help of a potter’s kick wheel, they made up to 10-15 different pottery in 2 hours.

The pottery of Karsun craftsmen stood out with its special decor: terracotta-colored items were decorated with large strokes, wavy lines, meander (consisting of a continuous line) and plant motifs.

Statistics from 1910-1911 show that one in three male villagers, including teenagers, were engaged in pottery. Pottery production was a family business until in the 1920s the craftsmen were united into a trade cooperative. In the 1960s, they built a brick factory at the collective farm that operated until the 1990s.

In 1968, an expedition of the Research Institute of Art Industry of the Ministry of Local Industry of the RSFSR and the Museum of the Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR went to Sukhoi Karsun to study the ancient techniques of pottery. In 2009, they organized a pottery museum in the village.

The director of Sukho-Karsun pottery house Olga Andreeva described preparing clay for work as follows: