In the old days, a chest served as a bed, a wardrobe, and a symbol of the accumulated wealth. Chests were made of oak, beech, or ash; they were banded with metal strips forming a characteristic checkered pattern. There were chests upholstered with rich fabrics and even sealskins.

A chest is mentioned in the novella titled ‘PodlIpovtsy, ’ written by the representative of the democratic literature of the 1860s Fyodor Reshetnikov. This ‘coffer’ ‘contains boots, a mirror, tea, sugar, two chintz shirts, two blue tick robes’ — the wealth acquired by the two sons of a peasant from the village of PodlIpnaya. Brothers PAvel and IvAn managed to escape poverty and became stokers on a steamer. They went to ‘Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, and Astrakhan, ate apples and watermelons, have matured a great deal, and even know how to read’. The chest signifies a new stage in the life of these characters.

The chests are stacked in the mud room of the museum, in accordance with an old tradition. Two chests stand out in this stack: they have a ‘frosted’ pattern that resembles winter frost on a window. In Russia, such chests became popular at the turn of the 20th century. They were initially produced in the UK, but then the craftsmen in the town of NevyAnsk, which was famous for its chest craft, learned the secret of the ‘frost.’ It turned out that the pattern emerged as follows: water was sprinkled on a sheet of tin with a molten mixture of tin and lead, and water droplets left fanciful ‘frosty’ patterns.

‘Frosted’ chests had a rich color palette: varnish gave a muted matte effect, drying oil provided shades of brown, and dyes were used to make any color. Common tints were bronze, malachite and turquoise.
The first chests with frosty design were sold at the largest Russian fairs in Nizhny Novgorod, Irbit and Troitsk.

Another sophisticated metalworking technique for chests was called ‘pechatka’ (stamping). Nevyansk craftsmen knew it too. ‘Pechatka’ was done on tin sheets: usually it was a floral pattern applied through a stencil with a solution of silver, and later cinnabar. Iron was repeatedly covered with oil varnish with different ingredients and the pattern was rolled on, and fixed by ‘roasting’ the sheets in the furnace.