Itelmen Preparing Fish to be Dried 1769 Jean-Baptiste Le Prince French The French artist Jean-Baptiste Le Prince traveled extensively across the Russian Empire between 1757 and 1763. Upon his return to France, he was enlisted to produce illustrations for the Voyage en Sibérie (1768), which recounted the astronomer Jean Chappe d’Auteroche’s (1728-1769) expedition to Tobolsk, Siberia in 1761 and included a French translation of Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov’s (1713-1755) Opisanie zemli Kamchatki [Description of the land of Kamchatka] (1755), which described the Great Northern Expedition (1733-
Itelmen Preparing Fish to be Dried 1769 Jean-Baptiste Le Prince French The French artist Jean-Baptiste Le Prince traveled extensively across the Russian Empire between 1757 and 1763. Upon his return to France, he was enlisted to produce illustrations for the Voyage en Sibérie (1768), which recounted the astronomer Jean Chappe d’Auteroche’s (1728-1769) expedition to Tobolsk, Siberia in 1761 and included a French translation of Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov’s (1713-1755) Opisanie zemli Kamchatki [Description of the land of Kamchatka] (1755), which described the Great Northern Expedition (1733-1743), led by Vitus Bering (1681-1741).(1) Krasheninnikov drew on both his personal experiences and the manuscripts of Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746), who joined Krasheninninkov in Kamchatka, a peninsula in eastern Russian, and sought to describe comprehensively the Indigenous peoples of the region, particularly the Itelmen, referred to in the eighteenth century as Kamtchadals or Kamchatkans.(2) Steller and Krasheninnkov’s text provides one of the only written accounts of Itelman culture before the population was decimated by disease, Cossack conquest and enslavement, and Russian exploitation.(3) At Chappe’s behest, Le Prince reworked the original Russian images of Itelmen life, repackaging them in eighteenth-century French Rococo wrappings. While this preparatory drawing is similar to the image Le Prince produced for Chappe’s publication, its later date and slightly different composition indicate it was produced for the encyclopedic travel compilation, Histoire Générale des Voyages (1770), which excerpted Chappe’s translation of Krasheninnikov.(5) For the same volume of this publication, the first half of which describes Greenland, Le Prince also produced the drawing "Inuit Manner of Dress" ().While Le Prince’s two versions of "Itelmens Preparing Fish to be Dried" removed many details of Itelmen life represented in the original images, certain part
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