Rumelian Turk; Trebizonian Laz; and Turkish woman and child on a donkey

Evgeny Lanceray’s trip to Angora (the historic name of Ankara, the capital of Turkey) and its surroundings in summer 1922 was his longest artistic and ethnographic trip, according to Pavel Pavlinov’s extensive research (P. Pavlinov, Evgeny Lanceray. Caucasus. Art and Travels, Moscow, 2019; P. Pavlinov’s dissertation from 2018). Invited by the ambassador of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to Turkey, Semyon Aralov (1880-1969), Lanceray spent slightly over three months in the region, meticulously documenting his trip in his travel journal as well as with his numerous artistic works. According to Pavlinov, besides the many sketches and drawings in his albums, the artist also created around 150 works executed in watercolour, gouache, ink, sanguine, pastel, charcoal, and pencil. Lanceray worked with a range of different media, often combining them, and used various types of paper to document precisely what he saw, to accurately and clearly convey all the details, colours and textures.
Lanceray originally planned to publish a richly illustrated book about his trip to Angora based on his travel journal, albums, drawings and watercolours. However, due to the economic situation in the Soviet Union and the introduction of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, this wish would never come true. Lanceray was hoping to find a contact at a French publishing house through Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) and Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967) who lived in Paris at that time, but that never happened. Subsequently, in the spring of 1925, 3000 copies of Lanceray’s Leto v Angore. Risunki i zametki iz dnevnika poezdki v Anatoliyu letom 1922 [Summer in Angora. Drawing and notes from the artist's travel diary to Anatolia in summer 1922] with observations from the artist’s travel journal, accompanied by 62 black and white illustrations made from zincographic plates, were published in Leningrad. Even though the final version of the book perhaps did not fully reflect Lanceray’s original artistic intentions, it still represents a great example of his ethnographic studies and observations as well as one of the last examples of Mir Iskusstva aesthetics in publishing.
Two works from the present lot very closely resemble two illustrations in the 1925 edition of Leto v Angore [Summer in Angora]. This suggests that Lanceray used these works, executed during his trip, to create small, black and white reproductions in his book: Trebizonian Laz is presented on page 33 and Turkish woman and child on a donkey - on page 69.