«Signboard industry as it exists here is a purely Russian phenomenon. Multilanguage communities and overwhelming illiteracy required figural advertising, which would set forward the sphere of business explicitly. Before they started painting signs, the very objects of the business had been hanged on the doors and the gates: a truss of straw denoted an inn, a wheel showed that a wheelwright lived here, a hoop stood for a cooper’s shop, and a skin, for a skinnery. Such kind of advertising existed in Western Europe ages ago, but they passed from that point directly to verbal advertising, whereas here even down to recent times the signboards were majorly descriptive. Convenience and the pull of a painted signboard forced out figural advertisements, and in the 19th century the guild of signboard painters spread all over the country»

(K.S. Petrov-Vodkin. The Euclid Space)