State Porcelain Factory.

The Imperial Porcelain Factory (or Manufactory) (Imperatorskii Farforovyi Zavod), is a producer of fine, handpainted ceramic products in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Many still refer to the factory by its well-known former name, Lomonosov Porcelain Factory. Founded in 1744, the porcelain factory was created by the order of Empress Elizabeth to "serve native trade and native art."[1] The factory produced wares exclusively for the ruling Romanov family and the Russian Imperial Court.

About one hundred years after its founding, the factory gained the name "Imperial Porcelain Factory" (IFZ - Imperatorskii Farforovyi Zavod). It then began to produce and market porcelain for sale to wider markets.

In 1918 the factory was nationalized. And as a State property the factory was given to the charge of the National commissariat of education, that gave a task to turn the former court factory into “a testing ceramic laboratory of republican significance” producing “an eminently propaganda porcelain – revolutionary in its idea, perfect in its shape and technically flawless”. factory’s art policy was an element of Lenin’s plan of monumental propaganda with its precisely determined principles of the art of porcelain.

Porcelain of the 1920’s may be one of the most interesting and amazing chapters in the history of decorative and applied art. In a perfect artistic form and historically truly it reflected the spirit of the first post-revolutionary years. Under the direction of S. Chekhonin, who later would be called “a master of Soviet Empire style”, many talented artists such as A. Schekotikhina-Pototskaya, N. Daniko, V. Kuznetsov, M. Lebedeva, M. Adamovich and others created propaganda porcelain. Porcelain of the 1920’s also evokes the names of B. Kustodiev, K. Petrov-Vodkin, M. Dobuzhinskiy and the world-famous names K. Malevich and V. Kandinskiy.

Beside the factory’s achievements in producing artistic porcelain, the one for chemical and technical purposes was also successfully developed, the first optical glass was invented here. So it wasn’t by chance that in 1925, on the occasion of the 200’s anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Factory was named after M.V. Lomonosov, a genius Russian scientist.