March 19, 2020

If you are a character in a Russian fairytale and you seek help, where would you go? Away from the crowds (as we all should be doing now) into the dark wild forest, and you would find a house on chicken feet, and you would ask the house to turn its back to the forest and its front to you. And the house would do it, because it has feet to turn around on! And who would open the door for you? Of course, Baba Yaga! And no matter how scary or occasionally cannibalistic, she would help you if you ask the right kinds of questions.

This old cast-iron house on chicken feet is a clock holder. It was made more than a century ago in the Urals, at the famous Kasli Factory.
1906. Kasli Factory, the Urals.

Sculptor Mikhail D. Kanaev and metalworker V. Baranov
Collection of The Museum of Russian Art