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THE LUBOK, OR BROADSIDE, was a very popular form of folk art in Russia from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. These beautiful prints were originally made from woodblocks created from boards made of linden wood (hence their name, from the word for a splint of wood, lub), then colored by hand with tempera paints. As the technology of printing progressed, the woodblock prints increasingly gave way to colored engravings, and by the late nineteenth century lubki were mass-produced by chromolithography, in the process losing their individuality and much of their charm.
