Relatively recently, the porcelain collection of the Tomsk History Museum acquired two dinner plates, which also doubled as service plates for soup bowls. Their reverse side is stamped with the words ‘Ye. A. Osipov. Tomsk.’ One of these plates is displayed in the merchant’s drawing room.

The Museum also has several other items with markings mentioning Tomsk or Tomsk entrepreneurs. These markings belonged not to porcelain and faience manufacturers, but rather to Tomsk tableware shops and the merchants who owned them. Currently, we have no information regarding faience or porcelain ever being produced in Tomsk prior to the Russian revolution, and therefore, tableware with markings of shops owned by Grigory Baukin, Yemelyan Osipov and Mikhail Lyapunov were most likely made somewhere else. Researchers suggest that the merchants might have acquired it from Ivan Perevalov’s factories near Irkutsk. And once they brought the products to the city, they marked them with their own names. This could be done in the Tomsk-based porcelain painting workshop at the store owned by that very same Perevalov. Thus, based on its manufacturer, it is considered to be Irkutsk porcelain, while judging by its markings, it is Tomsk porcelain.

The plate on display was sold in one of the shops owned by the merchant Yemelyan Osipov. Mentions of his name in the mercantile community can be traced back to the early 1890s. In 1907, he co-founded the Ye. A. Osipov and M. F. Yaroslavtsev trading house, as well as established a number of other companies. One of them was the A. Ye. Osipov and K. Trading House, which sold tableware. The merchant placed an advertisement of his shop’s porcelain, faience, and glassware from “the best Russian and foreign factories” in the “1906 calendar of Siberian commerce and industry”.

Items with the print “Ye. A. Osipov. Tomsk” are characterized by exquisite shape and workmanship. They are all made of thin and very hard porcelain of high quality and covered with a layer of transparent glaze. All tableware sold by Osipov was decorated in the Art NouvEAU style. It was the most fashionable and popular trend in art and design at the turn of the 20th century. The plate showcased as part of our composition has an ornately shaped edge and is decorated with an elegant floral design featuring intertwined branches of lilac painted in muted natural hues.