Lot 161: BRONISLAW ZALESKI

1820-1880 FOURTEEN DRAWINGS OF CENTRAL ASIA Quantity: 14 each variously numbered and inscribed pencil on paper varying sizes, each approximately 19 by 30cm, 7 1/2 by 12in.

Zaleski was a true renaissance man, trained as a lawyer, active as a scientist, artist and writer, and strongly involved in the Polish independence movement. Together with the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevshenko, he travelled on a scientific expedition to Kazakhstan in the 1850s, acting as a cartographer and drawing detailed plans and maps of the region, as well as a series of finely executed landscape studies. The present lot contains fourteen such rare works, including depictions of the Aral region and Karatau Mountains. Settling in Paris later in life, he published an account of his travels in 1864 vividly illustrated with his own etchings and entitled La vie de steppes Kirghizes.