The Sculpture of Eugene Lanceray and its Influence.

Author: Geoffrey Sudbury - with particular thanks to my wife, Rachel. How this research began:

During my wartime and civil service careers, I was posted to York, Cambridge, London, Paris, Washington DC and finally Cheltenham where I have spent most of my retirement since 1986.  Throughout these years, I visited a large number of exhibitions in national and other major museums in order to study both the exhibits and the archives. Amongst other interests, it gradually dawned on me that in England at least, there were very few exhibitions of Russian fine and applied art, and that English curators had scant knowledge of it. They could not, for example, identify a high quality Russian bronze statuette which had caught my eye and about which I had enquired. This work was in a Gloucestershire antique shop, was 61 cm high, signed in Cyrillic by the artist - Eugene Lanceray and had been bought by a collector, without provenance. The mystery surrounding this masterful work was sufficient to pique my curiosity and I became determined to find out more about it.

St Petersburg:

The opportunity to investigate the statuette increased vastly after the fall of Communism in 1991, so at this point, armed with letters of introduction from my former Cambridge professor in Russian, Dame Elizabeth Hill, I went with my wife Rachel, who had recently retired from her medical practice, to St. Petersburg to investigate the statuette. Despite various difficulties, including no user-friendly telephone directories, after two weeks, we located Aleksej Lanceray, the grandson of Eugene Lanceray (1848 - 1886).

Eugene Lanceray (1848 - 1886)

Aleksej, a charming and highly successful architect, generously invited me to come again to St. Petersburg to stay with him and his wife and I took him up on the offer as soon as I could. He explained that the name "Lanceray", which has subsequently been spelt in various ways, originally came from a member of Napoleon I's Grande Armee who stayed in Russia after he was wounded in the 1812 invasion. Aleksej also showed me loose, untitled photographs of over one hundred of his grandfather’s sculptures which included the Gloucestershire statuette, although he knew surprisingly little about the works. We were soon discussing the possibilities of gathering sufficient information to build a catalogue raisonne.  Aleksej then arranged for me to describe our nascent research project in a talk at the UNESCO building on September 5th 1994. I was concerned that the large audience would resent an unqualified foreigner presuming to say what should be done with regard to the conservation of Lanceray’s work though Aleksej reassured me on this point, and in response to my appeal for help during the talk, several collectors immediately came forward to offer their assistance.  I later encountered in Russia only one owner who withheld, for whatever reason, some important information.

Moscow:

Aleksej sent me on to Moscow to stay on the first of several occasions with his widowed sister-in-law and nephew, who is also a sculptor.  They let me photograph their extensive archive and supplied me with invaluable technical information about modelling in wax and casting in bronze.

St. Petersburg:

Back in St. Petersburg, Aleksej introduced me to Dr. Elena Karpova, senior curator of bronze at the Russian Museum.  She became my de facto tutor who helped us decide upon the format of the proposed catalogue on Lanceray when she came to stay with us in our small Paris flat.   My wife meanwhile was teaching herself how to type in Cyrillic so that we could exchange emails with Dr. Karpova and others in Moscow who only spoke Russian. All the while, we were collecting more and more information from a wide variety of sources in Western Europe, the USA and Canada, all of which we visited several times.

Paris and New York:
In Paris, we worked with two more of the sculptor’s grandchildren, the well-known painters, Alexander Serebiakoff and his sister Catherine.  They told us of a pair of life-size statues by Lanceray somewhere in New York. This started us on a long hunt through New York City and State before we found the sculptures in a private collection across the Hudson in New Jersey. How they got there, and another pair we traced to Menton in France, are tales too long to tell here, but we were delighted with these finds.  

Creating the Catalogue Raisonne:

For each of Lanceray's sculptures, we created separate files of information which we called ‘biographies’, since each piece had its own unique history. These "biographies" described the 200 bronzes of Lanceray’s fine and applied art that we had eventually managed to trace, which is approximately half the total number of works credited to him by contemporary authors. The sculptures we could not trace probably include singleton commissions which were later melted down into ingots for re-use.   We put these "biographies" in chronological order of the date of modelling in wax since the first casting of some of the bronzes sometimes happened many years after the first modelling. We also cross-referenced these dates with political, military, horse racing and other reports in contemporary Russian newspapers and journals, such as the Vsemirnaya Illyustratsia, and found that Lanceray's sculptures were often inspired by and reported upon these events. Indeed these reports occasionally carried a line engraving of Lanceray’s latest work. The next heading in the ‘biographies’ is the title of each sculpture as chosen by the artist himself which is either in Russian or French. In the case of multi-figure compositions depicting, say, a drove of horses or a troop of cavalry, we created a file for the complete work along with separate ones for each of the animals or humans if Lanceray had also created these individually. As we explain later, this detail yielded the vital link in our exegesis of one of American artist Frederick Remington’s letters.

Approximately fifty works also have alternative names, so called “descriptive titles” that we found in contemporaneous copyright deeds in archives in St. Petersburg. These titles record the distinguishing features of each work as described by the copyright holders. By contrast, a third type of title often caused confusion: all sorts of piss-aller dreamt up by the dealers and collectors who often did not understand various Cyrillic inscriptions on the statuettes.  

As regards the casting of Lanceray's works, we can reasonably guess that the bronze used for casting at this time was an alloy of 75% copper, 23-24% zinc which was mixed with lead to give fluidity to the run. The final version of our catalogue raisonne also lists all the exhibitions in which each sculpture was shown anywhere in the world between 1969 and 1998.  This list includes an exhibition in London in 1910 where Lanceray's “Catching a Wild Horse” (1876) was on public view. We will later show the great significance of this work.

Catching a Wild Horse (1876)

Lanceray: His Life: We also investigated Lanceray’s life and artistic career.  The first notable event in his life was in the summer of 1866 when he was only eighteen and on holiday in Kazan.  There he was presented to the Crown Prince, the future Alexander III and he offered the Prince his wax model “Troika which has lost a Wheel”:  

Troika which has lost its wheel (1866)

now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and was eventually cast in bronze in 1954.  It is a complicated composition by a precocious, self-taught genius who refused to submit to the stifling classical precepts of the French-led Imperial Academy. It epitomised instead a new artistic trend which he initiated and followed all his life, two main features of which are realism and the capture of motion. As with many of his later compositions, this troika is episodic, depicting as it does the exact moment when the driver looks over his shoulder to see what has happened. This and other characteristics were later to prove influencial in the work of other sculptors, such as Remington and Clark, (see below).

Lanceray's Work: All of Lanceray's works conform to the genre of realism and many of them depict the subject in motion. His statuettes portray raw, everyday life as it really was. All levels of society are represented from the Imperial family through officer and landowner class to peasants. Summer after summer, he rode on horseback to the distant boundaries of the Russian Empire, committing the varied appearance of tribesmen to his photographic memory and bringing home artefacts which he used as models for his statuettes. He also created much smaller works known as figurines which sympathetically represented subjects such as a street trader selling matches from his tray or little children hauling unwieldy trolleys or pushing heavy wheelbarrows. These were not created for wealthy patrons, since they would not have been acceptable in their drawing rooms, but they nonetheless bear witness to Lanceray’s enduring humanity.
By way of an example of his military work, we have a statuette depicting an ensign or junior officer who appears to be riding proudly as if on a parade ground:

Cadet de l'Ecole de Cavalerie Nicolai (1882)
As an example of poor working folk, we have a sleigh drive who has fallen asleep whilst waiting for his fare:

Troika au repos (1872)
but Lanceray's true preference was to depict farm labourers toiling in a country where remorseless poverty still predominated. Here we see the weary ploughman and his horse trudging across a field:

Retour de Labour (1873)

The second salient feature of Lanceray’s work, motion, can be technically very difficult to sculpt in wax since it often defies gravity.  For a leaping horse clearing a fence in “A Steeplechase” (1882):

Lanceray supported the animal's body from the fence below. However, he struggled when creating a galloping horse, writing in the winter of 1879/80, “I have succeeded in doing a small figure representing a galloping Circassian”.

A Cossack on a Galloping Horse (1879)

This work depicts the tribesman desperately trying to escape from a pursuing enemy; he thrashes his mount which lifts all four hooves off the ground with every stride.  Lanceray supports the animal with a few unobtrusive fragments of vegetation under the horse’s belly. This may be the first time a sculptor and foundry had together pulled off this artifice so successfully.  For Lanceray himself, galloping with a friend over boundless steppes was an exhilarating pastime and long before he undertook this composition, he had sketched it in his preparatory notebook. We doubt whether he knew that in the 1870’s in California, Eadweard Muybridge (1850 - 1904) had begun photographing horses galloping; Muybridge’s book “Human and Animal Motion”

was published in 1887, a year after Lanceray’s death.

Lanceray sculpted with the precision and fineness of a jeweller. Astonishing detail prevails.  On the uniform and bride of the Tzar’s “Falconer” (1872),

The Tzar's Falconer (1872)

we see every belt, buckle and button, even the pupils of his eyes as he follows the flight of his prey. Lanceray often worked in the foundries, collaborating with technicians and artisans in order to maximise the advantages of the lost-wax method of casting that was commonly used in St. Petersburg at the time.  It is worth noting that during the 19th century, foundries did not number their casts, so in Lanceray’s case, we have no means of knowing how many editions were made from the original.


Lanceray's Life continued: With his wife and growing family to support, Lanceray could not afford to travel to the Balkan War zone of 1877, as many in Russian society deemed necessary.  Instead he relied on a friend’s first-hand accounts which enabled him to create his commemorative sculptures of the Imperial Army’s exploits in crossing the Danube in June 1877:

Trois Fourrageurs Cosaques (1878)

and the Balkan mountains in December:

Passage des Balkans (1880)

Lanceray had long been handicapped by tuberculosis which fortunately he did not pass to his children.  However, by 1882, his state of health so alarmed Felix Chopin, the French proprietor of the foundry Lanceray used, that Chopin paid for him to spend the year of 1882-3 in Algeria, a place reputed to bring some relief.  This African sojourn produced further studies which today, along with other works, constitute a valuable ethnological record and resulted in new subject matter for his sculptures which had previously been mostly equine.  His African-inspired sculptures included tribesmen and their camels and donkeys. He also created a large composition 80cms h. x 107cms w. of four horses at the climax of their ceremonial dance, “The Grand Fantasia” 1884.  

He shows this head-on as he probably saw it. In 1886, he modelled “Sviatoslav” which portrays the Prince of Kiev on his fatal campaign of 972 AD to capture Tsargrad (Tsar's city) - also called Constantinople or Istanbul.

The belligerence of the horse and rider are powerfully depicted and the composition has become something of Lanceray's personal symbol.

Lanceray was a superb horseman with full knowledge of the skeletal structure, musculature and behaviour of many breeds of horse.  A friend of his relates how Lanceray patted his favourite stallion saying “I know every muscle in his body”. His bronze casts are today collected by the Ministry of Agriculture Horse Museum, Moscow and are even used to set breeding standards. The Director of the Museum, a retired Red Army veterinary colonel, explained for us the meaning of a work of Lanceray’s which was entitled “After the Battle” (1873). This was the very work that we had chanced upon in Cheltenham, UK in about 1990 and which had piqued our interest in the first place.  

A Cossack, riding his inferior breed of horse called a stepnyak which was originally the Ukrainian steppes and is now extinct, is leading away a captured, handsome Turkish argamak which he will use for breeding purposes.  

Lanceray's stay in Africa resulted in new subject matter for his sculptures which had previously been mostly equine.  There followed many new subjects, notably tribesmen and their camels and donkeys, subjects which were outside the scope of our book. He also created a large composition 80cms h. x 107cms w. of four horses at the climax of their ceremonial dance, “The Grand Fantasia” 1884.  He shows this head-on as he probably saw it. In 1886, he modelled “Sviatoslav” which portrays the Prince of Kiev on his fatal campaign of 972 AD to capture Tsargrad (Tsar's city) - also called Constantinople or Istanbul.

The belligerence of the horse and rider are powerfully depicted and the composition has become something of Lanceray's personal symbol.

In 1884, Lanceray acquired from his brother-in-law a large farmstead in Ukraine called  Sans-Souci or Neskoutchnoie, on the Kharkiv-Kiev road, where he chiefly devoted himself to raising horses and other livestock and cultivating 30 horses.

Meanwhile his wife Catherine, herself a graduate artist of the Imperial Academy, organised a retrospective exhibition of her husband’s work in St. Petersburg.  Her illustrated catalogue includes 44 of his equine figures. Lanceray, as always modest, said that the exhibition lacked three essentials for success - “The artist should be famous, have new work to show and be involved in scandal!”   

In 1886, as he lay dying, he called for his favourite horse to be brought to his bedside to say goodbye to him.   He died shortly afterwards on March 23 1886, just a few days after the exhibition, which proved to be a success, had closed. Thereafter Catherine and her six children lived in the apartment of her father, the well-known artist Benois, in St. Petersburg.  She never remarried and their children grew up to form a pleiad of artists – painters, architects and sculptors who became well-known in their fields.

Publishing Our Book:

For several years, we found no publisher anywhere in the world who would consider editing an illustrated book about a little known Russian sculptor.  A well-known Moscow publisher quoted only unacceptably high prices for Russian and English editions and could not solve distribution problems. Fortunately a Swiss specialist fine art publisher, Favre in Lausanne, then offered very generous terms because our book fitted into a series they had already begun on portrayal of horses (not including donkeys and mules). The editor of the catalogue raisonne selected 150 items which all depicted horses, thereby omitting approximately fifty works which represented other domesticated animals such as donkeys, mules and camels, in order that the publication conform with his series of books about Stubbs, Picasso and others. We quickly signed a contract for a French edition and engaged a very able and intrepid French lady, Mme de La Fourniere, to prepare the text.  Also an experienced horsewoman, she added commentary on many of Lanceray’s compositions and she later qualified as Historienne de l’Art et des Civilisations.

A senior French diplomat known to the Lanceray family then negotiated with the Ambassador of the Russian Federation for the launch of our book at his Paris Residence, formerly the palace of Tzar Alexander III. So many people came for the launch from Moscow and St Petersburg that the spacious building was overcrowded and unfortunately not all English friends were allowed entry.  Many Russians were delighted that their overlooked and long forgotten master had now been assigned his rightful place on the world stage. During the following days, we organised in the Paris region guided tours of the extensive Cossack Museum and the Susse Foundry (which had cast nearly all of Lanceray's bronzes) and an equitation display at the stables at Versailles.

        
We then travelled to the Centre for the Study of American Western Art in Denver, Colorado to present the potentially delicate case that Lanceray, a Russian, was responsible for inspiring Frederic Remington in his creation of 'Broncho Buster' which has always been acknowledged to be an emblem of the United States.  We put the case to a large and knowledgeable audience at a banquet in New York where it was accepted without question.

In the international specialist press, our book won plaudits for the research it contained and for some years, collectors in the West sent us photos of their statuettes which they thought were by Lanceray. We were able to confirm the identity of some as being by Lanceray. Others were by his contemporaries in St. Petersburg, notably Gratchiov, who had adopted his style and Lieberich.  My wife, Mme de La Fourniere and I have examined Lanceray's statuettes from as far away as the Ural mountains and collections on the west coast of North America and subsequently we have discovered no additional works. This leads us to think that our book may well be far more complete than we had originally believed possible. During the summer of 2010, an exhibition of fifteen Lanceray statuettes was held in the Haras du Pin, the handsome stud built by Louis XIV near Argentan. This is where I was awarded the Laureat du Cadre Noire.

Lanceray's Influence:
During the years of research, we became increasingly aware of the extent of Lanceray's influence in the works of others.

The Remington Connection:

At some point during our investigations, we chanced upon the work of the American painter Frederic Remington (1861 - 1909)

We immediately noted some very strong stylistic similarities between seventeen bronze statuettes by Remington and the work of Lanceray.  Later, in the British Library, we found a rare copy of a book by a companion of Remington, "The Borderland of Czar and Kaiser" by Poultney Bigelow (1895):

in which Bigelow describes how he had accompanied Remington, who at this point had never attempted any sculpture, on a visit to Russia in 1892, six years after Lanceray's death, and that he and Remington had spent five days in St. Petersburg before being hounded out of the country by the Third Department, forerunner of the ChK and the KGB. Whilst Remington and Lanceray do not therefore appear to have met in person, it seems from letters that Remington wrote at the time, that he purchased a sculpture by Lanceray which he took home with him to New York. Remington, was no linguist but seeing that the rider had a sheep athwart his mount, in a letter to a friend dubbed the sculpture, ‘The Cossack plunder" (with a small ‘p’). This misled us into thinking he meant artefacts he had collected himself. Remington also wrote that he was amazed to see Lanceray's sculptures which represented in three dimensions, subjects which to his knowledge had only ever been previously depicted in two dimensions. He was particularly struck by the sculptural portrayal of animals in motion which he himself had been addressing in painting. As soon as he could, he subsequently took up sculpture, and as his first attempt, he used a figure which he had previously painted:

The Broncho Buster (1901)

One early cast of this work stands in the Oval Office of the White House, and is often seen on television near to the President's desk. Indeed it is often regarded as a national emblem of the United States. As a result of Remington's letters, we finally had clear proof of how Lanceray had inspired him to take up sculpture, a connection in the history of equestrian sculpture that to our knowledge had not been previously made. The Clark Connection:

Robert L. Clark's masterpiece "Limber - a Broken Pole (1924), a bronze maquette in the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery (named “the Wilson in 2013) also serves as a good example of Lanceray's influence:

We had known of this work for many years and it appeared that several of its features were common to the work of Lanceray, but was not immediately clear how Clark would have come across works of the master.  It was only in 2016 that we found the link in the chain of events which all in likelihood connects Clark’s “Limber” to Lanceray’s work and therefore, in terms of style to the work of other artists, such as Remington, who were also influenced by Lanceray.
A member of the Wilson staff drew our attention to John Whitaker’s book “The Best: a history of H.H. Martyn & Co” (the large Cheltenham foundry).  This book recorded that Clark was an artisan who had shown talent while working for H.H.Martyn & Co.  The firm sent him on an apprenticeship lasting three years (1909-11 inclusive) at the Lambeth Schools, London.

For some years up to 1910,  there had been an overproduction of Lanceray's statuettes in St. Petersburg, so the Morand foundry (which had taken over from the Chopin foundry when Chopin retired to France) sent 43 Lanceray statuettes to an exhibition in London at the Doré gallery,  which according to the V&A’s catalogue of the exhibition, was in New Bond Street in premises that are now Sotherby’s. In his book, John Whitaker mentions that Clark was in London at the time, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have missed the outstanding and well-advertised exhibition.  We can assume that Clark would have seen Lanceray’s “Catching a Wild Horse”,

which we had recorded in our Catalogue Raisonne (p.122) as having been exhibited in that particular exhibition. This shows a scene which is very rarely attempted in sculpture because of its extreme difficulty - a terrified, galloping, wild horse being violently restrained by a lasso around his neck. This subject is so difficult for a sculptor to model in wax that as far as we know it had not been attempted before;  it demands superb knowledge of the musculature of the animal and unusual powers of memory and dexterity on the part of the sculptor, as well as manipulative mastery to prevent collapse of the model. Lanceray ensures that the viewer understands the subject of this sculpture by adding a bas-relief along the base of the sculpture, showing how a Khirgiz tribesman rides over the steppes in pursuit of a drove of wild horses, holding a loop on a long pole over the head of one of the horses which reacts violently.

When Clark later entered a competition to create a War Memorial for Cheltenham, he appears to have recalled Lanceray’s composition and style in this work as inspiration for the reaction of the horse in his own complicated maquette, “Broken Limber”.  

We described our reasoning regarding the chain of influence from Lanceray to Clark to a professional sculptor who is an academic specialising in hot metal casting.  He considers that the connection between Lanceray and Clark extremely likely and so we have confidence to describe it as echoing the study of motion and episodic themes found in Lanceray’s work.  

As a postscript on Clark’s “Broken Limber”, we understand that only three casts of the maquette were made and that the great expense of casting it life-size in bronze unfortunately meant that Cheltenham could not afford it, so the existing stone cenotaph was erected in the Promenade in its place. Conclusion:

Investigating Lanceray has been a fascinating journey which has taken us across continents and through history and although it may be that we do not find any more of his works, the chain of his influence and his legacy continue to turn up in unexpected places. Eugene A. Lanceray was non-political and pioneered a new movement in sculpture that led to the "Bronco Buster" in the White House, and the "Limber - a Broken Pole" in the Wilson Gallery, Cheltenham. He was one of the world's greatest equine sculptors of all time.

References:

Bigelow, P.,  The Borderland of Czar and Kaiser

Sudbury, G.W. , Lancery, le Sculpteur Russe du Cheval

Whitaker, J, The Best. History of H.H. Martyn and Co.
Vsemirnaia, Illiioustratsiia (counterpart of Illustrated London News)
Photo Acknowledgements:

The photo “The Limber - a broken pole” is reproduced with permission of the Wilson Gallery, Cheltenham Borough Council and the Cheltenham Trust.