LANCERAY, Evgeni Alexandrovich
Evgeni Alexandrovich Lanceray (Eugène Lanseré), Russian sculptor. He was the grandson of Major Paul Lanseré of the Napoleonic army, who was wounded and captured at the Battle of Borodino (1812) and decided to remain in Russia, where he married the daughter of the governor of Vilna.
Lanceray studied at the local grammar school in his native town of Morshansk in Tambov Province. In 1861 he moved with his family to St Petersburg where he visited the studios of Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky and Baron Pyotr Klodt von Jürgensburg and was awarded a gold watch for a statuette by the future Tsar Alexander III (1866).
He travelled widely across Russia, Bashkiria, Kirghizia, Ukraine and the Caucasus, observing tribesmen and their animals. He sculpted around four hundred works on historical, ethnographic and genre themes. He cast works in bronze using the lost-wax method in foundries owned by Félix Chopin, Adolphe Moran and other Frenchmen in St Petersburg and in iron at foundries at Kasli in the Ural Mountains. He visited France (1867, 1876) and Algeria (1883).
Lanceray was awarded the titles of second-class artist (1869), first-class artist (1872) and honorary fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1876).
