Vintage Carved Set of Matryoshka Nesting Dolls

This is a medium size, five doll set of Matryoshka dolls (literal "little matron" dolls) depicting Mary and Jesus with various 'saints' religious figures as the smaller characters. They are also known as stacking dolls, nesting dolls, and simply they are a set of hand crafted and in this case detail carved (rather than simply painted) wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another.

A set of Matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure, which separates at the middle, top from bottom, to reveal a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. This set has the largest doll at 16 cm height and 9 cm diameter.

The first forms of these dolls were decorated as a woman, dressed in traditional peasant attire, later forms included other cultural themes as in this case, religious. Contemporary subjects are much more varied. We have dated this particular design to the 1970's, although this set has a date and initials carved to the underside for 1997 and BA .

This is an undamaged and complete set, the joints are all perfectly sound, snug fit and ease of separation.