Ivan Petrovitch Pranishnikoff is a Russian painter and illustrator as well as an archaeological prospector, frequent traveler in Europe and North America. He was born on May 3, 1841, in the Kursk region, in western Russia, of aristocratic parents. His family was enriched during the continental blockade of Napoleon by the trade in beet sugar, huge quantities of which came from factories and the family farm. At the time of the young Yvan she followed the assignments of the father, an officer of the tsar in Poland occupied by the Russians. A boarder in a military high school in Warsaw, Ivan then studied painting around 1858 at the Saint-Luc Academy in Rome where he received his artistic training. He works with the Russian painter Nikolai Gay. In 1860, he would have joined Garibaldi and would have covered Montenegro's war of independence for the periodical L'Illustration. Between 1861 and 1866, he resumed a cycle of pictorial studies in Italy, in Florence, before going to Paris to study with Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. In 1867, he returned to Russia, Moscow and Kazan, where he exercised various trades including that of drawing teacher in a college for young girls in Ekaterinburg, worker in a telegraph company or wood sculptor. He then went to North America, first to Canada in 1871, where he married in 1874, then to New York around 1875-1876. In 1879 or 1880, he returned to Europe and settled in Paris. He attended the Mutual Aid and Benefit Society of Russian painters in Paris and met at that time, Ivan Tourgueniev, whose works he would translate into Provencal a few years later. He discovered Provence in 1880, thanks to Daudet, Lamartine and Mistral who came to present Mireille in Paris. And from 1882, he made stays in the south of France in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. In the years 1887-1894, he was official painter of the ministry of war of Alexander III, emperor of Russia, and visits Russia every summer. Around 1899-1900, he settled definitively in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where he frequented the Provençal Félibers including Frédéric Mistral, participated in the activities of the Camargue gardians with the Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon and was particularly interested local prehistory; he draws up a very exhaustive inventory of megalithic monuments and archaeological sites in Languedoc and Provence (his album of photographs can be found at the Arlaten museum in Arles). He integrated in 1904, from their creation, the Prehistoric Society of France and the Archaeological Society of Provence. Among other publications, he owes him, in 1907, a study on the engravings of the menhir of Congénies (Gard). He died on April 16, 1909 in Les Saintes, where he was buried. His wife also had the sculptor Léopold Bernard Bernstamm make a bronze bust of her husband, unfortunately stolen since. In the main street, on the facade of the house he lived in, a plaque affixed in 1912 recalls his memory.
N.B. This lithogravure from around 1860 was the subject, on our part, of a special treatment in order to make disappear the outrages of time and, in particular, the numerous foxings which smeared it. After this treatment, we pasted it on a watermarked paper. This treatment had the effect of "rejuvenating" it; however, it remains an authentic lithogravure from the second half of the 19th century.
GUINÉE - PIROGUE au DÉBARCADÈRE du GRAND TALIBONCHE
- Belle gravure (lithogravure) du 19eme siècle contrecollée sur papier filigrané