Prince Alexis Soltykoff

Prince Alexis Soltykoff (1806–1859) was a Russian nobleman who twice crossed the East, and among the tinted lithographs of his Voyages dans l’Inde are scenes drawn in Ceylon on the spot, including ‘Route entre Colombo et Kandy’ and ‘Fête de la Lune à Ceylan’, both dated to 1841. He belongs, therefore, to the small group of Continental artists who saw the island for themselves rather than working it up from another hand’s sketches, and his eye fell less on the topography than on the movement of people, processions and ceremony that most engaged him across the whole of his eastern travels.

Soltykoff made two long journeys through India and Ceylon, the first between 1841 and 1843 and the second between 1845 and 1846, sketching as he went. On his return he worked the drawings into lithographs and published them in Paris, where the folio appeared across several editions around 1848 to 1851 under the imprints of Curmer and Lecou, among others. A complete set gathers thirty-seven hand-coloured plates, one of them a map, ranging from Madras, Madurai and Travancore in the south to Gwalior, Lucknow, Delhi, Lahore and the Himalaya in the north, with the Ceylon subjects among them. The work carried a companion volume of letters, Lettres sur l’Inde, and was honoured with a gold medal from the Russian emperor.

The plates are tinted lithographs taken from Soltykoff’s own drawings, and it is that first-hand authority, rather than any claim to topographical exactitude, that gives the Ceylon sheets their value as a record. The volume is held in the national collections, the Bibliothèque nationale de France among them, and appears with some regularity in the rare-book trade, where complete coloured copies have passed through Bonhams and Sotheby’s.