Alexander Ivanovich Pluchart | Nouvelle collection de quarante-deux vues de Saint-Pétersbourg, 1826, splendid lithographs of imperial St Petersburg

Alexander Ivanovich Pluchart.

Nouvelle collection de quarante-deux vues de Saint-Pétersbourg et de ses environs, dessinées d'après nature par divers artistes. Accompagnées d'un plan de la ville. St Petersburg: Alexandre Pluchart, 1826

Oblong folio (349 x 508mm.), letterpress title-page, hand-coloured engraved city plan with a keyed reference sheet, table of contents, 44 lithographed views, all but 3 titled in French, bound to style in quarter straight grained red morocco over nineteenth-century paper boards, original title panel laid on

A CELEBRATED ALBUM OF VIEWS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY ST PETERSBURG IN ALL ITS IMPERIAL SPLENDOUR.

"St Petersburg was especially lucky with lithography. If all the rest of its images — in paintings, watercolours, engravings, and photographs — were lost and only lithographic views… remained, even then it would be possible to fully judge it, and not only about the beauty and significance of its monuments or the special character of its wide avenues and canals, but also about the very soul of this ghostly and monumental, 'official' and poetic city that grew out of the swamp" (A.N. Benois).

St Petersburg is here in all its finery, in the days when its elite spoke French and self-consciously adapted western European cultural trends, before the Bolshevik Revolution and all that followed.

Pluchart was a lithographer, typographer, painter, and publisher, who was born in Valenciennes, France, and moved to Germany after the French Revolution. There, he worked for the French royalist publisher Pierre Françoise Fauche. In 1806, he was invited to St Petersburg by the head of the French-language Journal du Nord to be its director of typography. Essentially a semi-official organ of the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the magazine acted as a counterpoint to Napoleonic propaganda.

Pluchart came to occupy several official posts, but he continued his publishing practice, founding a printing house in 1808 on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in central St Petersburg. A lithographic firm followed in 1818, which published the present album in response to the growing number of European tourists visiting the city. Iterations of the album began to be published as early as 1821 and continued until 1827. Pluchart worked with the best Russian artists of the time, including A. Martynov, A. Orlowsky, K. Kolman, P. Alexandrov, K. Beggrov, A. Brullov, and others.

According to Tevyashov, Pluchart issued at least five editions of this album of lithograph views, all of which are rare: 1821-22 on 24 leaves; 1823 on 25 leaves; 1824 on 36 leaves; 1826 on 42 leaves (though the present example of the 1826 has 44 plates plus the map); and 1827 on 46 leaves. A copy of the earliest edition is at Harvard; this copy has nearly twice its plates. Only two copies with 43 plates or more are seen in institutions.

LITERATURE:

Somov, "La Russie dans a presse des émigrés: Altona, Hambourg, Brunswick et Saint-Pétersbourg, Conservatoire national de Saint-Pétersbourg," E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, 4 (2016): 160-190; State Hermitage Museum Educational Museum Program, "Petersburg in Early Russian Lithography."; Tevyashov,Opisanie neskolkikh gravur i lithograpfii [Description of several engravings and lithographs], SPb., (1912), pp.9,13