Vue prise aux etangs de la Presnia

Title

Vue prise aux etangs de la Presnia

Description

Magnificent view of the city of Presnya in Moscow.

ca. 1830

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

Moscow is the major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, making it Europe's most populated inland city. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi. The Moskva River was incorporated as part of Kievan Rus into the Suzdal in the 11th century. The timber fort na Moskvě "on the Moscow River" was inherited by Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, in the 1260s, at the time considered the least valuable of his father's possessions. Daniel ruled Moscow as Grand Duke until 1303 and established it as a prosperous city that would eclipse its parent principality of Vladimir by the 1320s. On the right bank of the Moskva River, at a distance of five miles from the Kremlin, not later than in 1282, Daniel founded the first monastery with the wooden church of St. Daniel-Stylite. Now it is the Danilov Monastery. Daniel died in 1303, at the age of 42. Before his death, he became a monk and, according to his will, was buried in the cemetery of the St. Daniel Monastery. Moscow was stable and prosperous for many years and attracted a large number of refugees from across Russia. While Khan of the Golden Horde initially attempted to limit Moscow's influence, when the growth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania began to threaten all of Russia, the Khan strengthened Moscow to counterbalance Lithuania, allowing it to become one of the most powerful cities in Russia. The original Moscow Kremlin was built during the 14th century. The entire city of the late 17th century, including the slobodas that grew up outside the city ramparts, are contained within what is today Moscow's Central Administrative Okrug.