Russian Khokhloma Lacquered Wooden Dish, Gold Ground with Strawberries and Rowan over Black, Turned and Hand-Painted, c. 1960–1985

The Piece

A small turned wooden dish in the Russian Khokhloma tradition, painted and lacquered in gold, red and black.

The form is a round bowl on a red-painted foot ring, with the rim notched on two sides — squared cuts taken down into the wall.

The outside is the showpiece. A black ground carries large gold leaves, each veined with fine black comb strokes, twined with scarlet strawberries, red rowan berries and trails of small gold dots. The painting runs the whole way round without a repeat.

Inside, the wall is plain amber gold, with a single painted roundel of the same fruit and foliage in the well.

Underneath, the foot is finished in flat black. The whole piece is under a warm lacquer that gives the gold its depth.

History & Provenance

There is no gold in Khokhloma, and that is the entire craft. The tradition began in the second half of the seventeenth century in a village of that name in the Nizhny Novgorod region on the Volga, where Old Believers fleeing religious persecution brought icon-painting technique to local woodturners and taught them how to paint wood gold without using any.

The method is a sequence and every step matters. The turned piece is coated in drying oil; metal powder — tin originally, later aluminium — is laid over it, so the wood comes up silver; heat-resistant oil paints go on over that; then lacquer; then the piece goes into an oven. In the heat the lacquer ambers, and the silver beneath it reads as gold. A silver bowl goes into the kiln and a gold one comes out.

The palette is fixed and the reason is practical. Red, black and gold, because those were the pigments that survived the firing. Everything else burned.

Two ways of working, and this piece uses both. Superficial painting puts red and black over the gold; background painting leaves gold silhouettes standing in a coloured field. The outside of this dish is the second kind — gold leaves reserved out of black — and the inside is the first.

The twentieth century industrialised it without killing it. Painters organised into artels through the 1920s and 30s, and by the 1960s two large factories were working — one near the original village and one at Semyonov — turning out tableware, utensils and souvenirs. Khokhloma became one of the most recognisable Russian exports of the Soviet period, which is how pieces like this reached American houses.

The dish carries no factory mark or paper label and is offered unattributed. Dated on the aluminium-and-lacquer gold, the hand painting, and the Soviet-era factory output that put this ware into export: c. 1960–1985.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Almost nothing in a normal house is this colour, and that is exactly why it works.

Scarlet, black and deep amber gold is a palette with no modern equivalent — it is not warm neutral, it is not muted, it is not tasteful in the current sense. Set it on a plain wooden shelf, a white mantel or a dark side table and it does the job a single strong object should do: it stops the eye and it makes everything around it look deliberate.

At four and a half inches it lands anywhere. A bedside table for rings and a watch, a desk for clips and stamps, a hall table for keys, a bathroom shelf for cotton buds. The notched rim gives it a silhouette that a plain bowl does not have, and it reads as a shape even from across a room.

The story is the other half of the value. It is worth knowing that the gold is not gold — that somebody laid metal powder over oiled wood, painted it, lacquered it and put it in an oven, and the heat turned silver into gold. That is a genuinely clever piece of craft, three and a half centuries old, and it is the kind of thing people pick an object up to hear.

It also groups. Khokhloma was made in vast quantity and variety, so a single dish is the start of a shelf of spoons, bowls and beakers in the same three colours if you want one.

A note on care, and lacquer over wood has clear limits. Keep it dry and never soak it. Water works under lacquer at the edges and lifts it, and once it lifts it flakes. Wipe with a barely damp cloth and dry immediately.

Never put it in a dishwasher or a microwave, and do not use it for hot or oily food — heat softens the lacquer and oil penetrates it. Traditional Khokhloma tableware was used for dry and cool food; treat this as a dry dish.

Do not polish it and do not use any solvent, including alcohol wipes, which will take the paint off along with the dirt. A dry cloth is the whole routine.

Keep it out of direct sunlight, which fades the reds and clouds the lacquer, and away from radiators and fireplaces — turned wood under lacquer splits when it dries out too fast.