Jean Baptiste Le Prince

Bio

The exotic world of Russia and the East had been open to western artists for little more than half a century when LePrince was summoned to Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great’s last surviving child, the Empress Elizabeth, in 1758. The Russian capital was a westward looking city and, at the upper ends of society, there was a conscious attempt to mimic French manners and fashions, while both the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great avidly collected western art. Outside Saint Petersburg life was still largely unchanged, despite the thin veneer of western civilization which had been forcibly grafted onto this barbaric people by the powerful will of the Czarina’s father. The Russian peasants portrayed in Le Prince’s Siberian drawings, fantasy paintings and multi-figured landscape must have seemed very exotic, therefore, to sophisticated western Europeans. The pictorial records of Russian provincial life with which the artist returned in 1765 fascinated the sophisticated French and proved attractive to eighteenth century collectors.