Itelmen Preparing Fish to be Dried

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" (2012.54).

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 particulars remain. Le Prince omitted the mounded openings to winter lodgings but included the elevated summer buildings, which the Itelmen also used to store provisions.(6) Le Prince also reproduced details such as the use of rocks heated in a fire to melt the fish fat in wooden basins, as well as the gendered divisions of tasks in the preparation of the catch. However, Le Prince simultaneously reworked the scene according to eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions in order to appeal to his French audience. Le Prince’s composition added figures and picturesque details such as the trees that arch over the scene. In addition to these compositional changes, in the 1768 version, Le Prince emphasized the male form, the foundation of French academic artistic training, with figures such as the half nude men, who display their muscled torsos while working over a smoking fire like assistants in Vulcan’s forge. In contrast, in the 1769 version, which was a slightly smaller format, Le Prince notably reduced the presence of the male nude. He decreased the number of figures around the fire, and the only remaining man is shown hunched over his task, his arm and long-handled implement largely obscuring his body. The man with his back to the viewer is posed awkwardly, almost off-balance, as he twists slightly while stretching one arm parallel to the ground and crooks the other. Le Prince’s movement away from the European ideal of the male body is accompanied by alterations to the women’s faces, which become almost schematic. The distinct hair style of the women on the right, in particular, frames the roundness of her face and tapering chin, features that diverge from eighteenth-century conventions of French feminine physiognomies. In this 1769 version, one thus observes within Le Prince’s Rococo presentation of the Itelmen a subtle distancing of these figures from European conventions of the human form.


(1) Jean Chappe d’Auteroche, Voyage en Sibérie Fait par Ordre du Roi en 1761 3 vols. (Paris: Debure Père, 1768).

(2) Steller died before he could return to Saint-Petersburg, though his extensive records eventually reached the Academy of Sciences. Steller’s party included the Russian painters J. H. Berkgan and J. W. Lurcenius, who may have provided the original images for the Russian engravings, see Georg Wilhelm Steller, trans. Marvin Falk, Steller’s History of Kamchatka: Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamchatka, its Peoples, their Manners, Names, Lifestyles, and Various Customary Practices (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003).

(3) According to Karen Willmore and Margritt Engel, "For the some 1,400 Itelmen remaining today on the west coast of Kamchatka, Steller’s detailed ethnographic descriptions are their most important sources of knowledge of their ancestors’ way of life as they begin to reestablish connections with their own traditions." Karen Willmore and Margritt Engel, "Introduction," in Steller’s History of Kamchatka, xiv. Steller was sympathetic to the Itelmen and wrotes: "[The Itelmens’] memories of their happy lifestyle now evoke many tears, and the bitterness will be completely gone only when the few remaining elders and ‘historians’ who were alive before the arrival of the Russians will have all closed their eyes; not many of them are left anyway." Steller, Steller’s History of Kamchatka, 167.

(5) This series was originally commissioned as a translation of John Green’s New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745-1747) but soon outgrew the English material. Between 1745 and 1761, Abbé Prevost edited the original sixteen volumes. Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon and Rousselot de Surgey published a continuation of the series, volumes seventeen through nineteen, between 1761 and 1770. Abbé Prévost, Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon, and Rousseleot de Surgy, Histoire générale des voyages, ou, Nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre, qui ont été publiées jusqu'à present dans les différentes langues de toutes les nations 19 vols. (Paris: Chez Rozet, 1746-1770), 19: 289.

(6) Tatiana Degai, "Itelmen world," consulted Nov. 30, 2020, http://www.u.arizona.edu/~tatianadegai/css/wheat/dwellings_eng.html.

(Thea Goldring, May 2021)