The Tomsk History Museum houses a fairly large faience and porcelain collection. It includes tableware from Europe, as well as several dozen of items produced at the famous Kuznetsov factory. However, the crown jewel of the collection is local porcelain. It was manufactured for local cafés and restaurants, as well as sold at retail to the city’s residents.

The museum owns several pieces of Tomsk tableware marked with monograms of merchant companies. Among them is a tureen with the print reading: Partnership of G. M. Baukina and M. D. Bobryshev in Tomsk. It is made of faience, as evidenced by the item’s translucency and fairly thick walls. The top of the tureen is covered with a thick layer of glaze that already has occasional cracks in it. The item is painted with a classic floral design. Presumably, the image was transferred from a paper mask using the decal technique, rather than created with a brush. However, some extra details were painted by hand. If you carefully examine the brush strokes, you may notice that some of them missed the stencil.

This tureen is of great importance to Tomsk history. The marking on its surface specifies the tableware store where it was sold, rather than the manufacturer. The item used to belong to Glykeria Baukina and Mikhail Bobryshev. Since no porcelain or faience tableware was produced in Tomsk in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, this raises the questions of where the item was produced and who made the markings.

It is likely that the merchants purchased it from the Khaitinsky and Yelovsky factories, which belonged to the Irkutsk industrialist Ivan Perevalov. By the early 20th century, their products became very popular in Siberia and matched the quality of those made in China and Europe.

The Partnership of G. M. Baukina and M. D. Bobryshev in Tomsk traces its history to the merchant Gavriil Baukin, who sold tableware in Tomsk since 1883. Not later than 1889, he became a member of the 1st Trade Guild. The entrepreneur traded porcelain, faience, enamel and cut glass tableware, lamps, kerosene, and iron products. His shops and stores were located in the center of the city. However, in 1908, the Tomsk District Court sentenced Gavriil Baukin to prison failing to pay his debts. During his imprisonment, his wife Glykeria Matveyevna took care of his trading business. She created a partnership joined by M. D. Bobryshev. The partners kept a tableware shop on Bazarnaya Square, which relocated to 8 Millionnaya Street on January 1, 1915.