Habitation du Kamtchatka. / Peche au Kamtchatka.

Title

Habitation du Kamtchatka. / Peche au Kamtchatka.

Description

Upper view shows a settlement of inhabitants in Kamchatka. The lower view shows fishing in Kamchatka.

ca. 1815

Artist

Engelmann (1788-1839)

Godefroy Engelmann was a 19th-century Franco-German lithographer and chromolithographer. Godefroy Engelmann was born in 1788 in Mühlhausen, a small town near the France/Switzerland/Germany border. At the time of his birth Mulhouse was a free German republic associated with the Swiss Confederation, but was annexed by France 10 years later. He died in that same town in 1839, from a tumor in his neck. Engelmann trained in Switzerland and France at La Rochelle and Bordeaux, and he studied painting and sketching in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s atelier in Paris. In the summer of 1814 he travelled to Munich, Germany to study lithography, a German invention. The following spring, he founded La Société Lithotypique de Mulhouse. In June 1816 he opened a workshop in Paris. Engelmann is largely credited with bringing lithography to France and later, commercializing chromolithography. In 1837 he was granted an English patent for a process of chromolithography that provided consistently high-quality results. Throughout his life, he produced large numbers of prints, including numerous plates for Baron Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor's celebrated collection of lithographs, «Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France». Engelmann's Paris printing company, -Engelmann et Graf- was passed on to his son, Godefroy Engelmann II (born 1819), who carried on his father's work with the same high artistic quality until his own death in 1897.

Historical Description

The Kamchatka Peninsula was discovered by Cossacks on their forays into eastern Russia in 1697. Since there were mainly a lot of sables here, the area was annexed by Russia shortly after. The indigenous people living there, the Koryaks, Itelmen, Evens, Chukchi and Aleuts (Unangan), were bloodily subjugated by Russian Cossacks and almost exterminated. The Dane Vitus Bering, after whom the strait between Eastern Siberia and Alaska is named, led large expeditions to Kamchatka and north to the Bering Sea from 1725 to 1730 and from 1733 to 1743. Georg Wilhelm Steller, botanist and theologian, wrote extensive notes from the second expedition.