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All the exhibits, the total number of which is about 1000, come from collection of the Russian museum and introduce all the main centres where folk toys have been being made for the previous 2 centuries. These include wide-known ones - Sergiev Posad, Dymkovo, Bogorodskoye, as well as those that are little known to the general public.
The toy is a wonderful and surprisingly various field of folk art. It can sometimes combine diametrically opposed principles. At the one hand, the folk toy has a settled and not wide range of subjects (woman figure, horse, bird), on the other hand, these subjects vary both in contents of images and in different materials.
Probably, in toys indissolubility of craft and art can be seen more obviously than in other kinds of folk art. In some areas people made toys just for their children, and in the other they were made for sale, the fact which contributed to arising there special centres where skill was handed from generation to generation, and distinctive features of local art were formed. They started to collect and scrutinize folk toy not earlier than at the end of XIXc., the time by which earlier toys had not remained. Such artists as A.N.Benoi, V.V.Mate, M.V.Dobuzhinsky, A.I.Denshin were among the first collectors of folk toys.
The exhibition showcases articles made of such popular in Russian folk art materials as clay and wood, as well as more rare ones, like straw, cones, birch bark, rags, bread-crumb, bone, etc.
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