Imperial Russian Samovar

As you may recall from my earlier thread, I recently acquired an antique Russian samovar. This one has the imperial crest and nine sets of exhibition medals. I'm a bit intimidated at the thought of cleaning it; I have another imperial samovar coming in (as the unfortunate consequence of a drunken bidding war, where it suddenly occurred to me how fantastic it would be to own two samovars), so I might practice on that one first. What do you think of it? Any ideas on how to preserve the wooden knobs?

 

I would use Renaissance wax on the knobs, but that is just me.

The Russian speakers among us probably know this better than I do, but this was probably made by a company that had an imperial warrant, rather than this being an imperial samovar.
You have to watch out with these, as with all Russian antiques, there are fakes. And 'regular' antique and vintage samovars are stamped with these stamps as well.

 

There are some good sites for looking for the marks on Russian samovars. Even better, they give historical info on who made them. I need more coffee this morning before looking. I know that many samovars were made in Tula.

Quick look: the writing says this was made by the Batashev brothers factory in Tula.

 

By imperial, I just meant that it was (hopefully) made before the Russian Revolution and wasn't stamped CCCP.

 

Thank you!

 

You're welcome. More specifically, the brothers who are mentioned on the samovar are Aleksei and Ivan.

This page appears to be machine-translated: https://www.shopsamovar.com/hystory/about-batashev-page-2/

It says that those brothers took over in 1894. A different page I found says that a P. I. Batashev took over by 1907. So you might consider late 19th to early 20th century as a date range for your samovar. With more research needed. (ADDED: The medals whose images are imprinted on the samovar have dates on them and I see 1899 as one of them. Look at those also.)

 

Watch out for those!

 

Another of the marks is from the early 1900's. I can't tell what year, but I'm going to see if I can find the exposition it relates to.

I think that I also have a P.I. Batashev samovar. I'll post pictures later.

 

Haha, I'll try from now on. Not like I have much money to spend anymore. I've pretty much drained all my thrifting earnings from the last 5 months, which I use to buy even more items.

I believe that the sole 20th century date is from 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.