The Lanceray Line

Paul Lanceray (c. 1788-c. 1826) was born, in all likelihood, in the Orne in Normandy - no birth record has been located, the Revolutionary years having ravaged the registers - and served, by family account with the rank of major, in Napoleon's Grande Armee during the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812. He was wounded and taken prisoner: the family archive places his capture near Smolensk, while later published biographies give Borodino, and the family research follows the archive - the source nearest to Paul himself - while flagging the question as open.

His survival was statistically extraordinary. Of the more than 100,000 French prisoners taken in the 1812 campaign, roughly half died in captivity; by family account Paul was sheltered and nursed back to health by a Baltic-German noble family. In Riga, around 1814-1815, he married Olga Karlovna von Taube, recorded in the family account as a ward of Baron Karl von Taube, became a Russian subject, and settled in Morshansk in Tambov Province. His survival, and his choice to stay, are the founding accidents of the Russian Lanceray line.

Two sons are documented, both born in Morshansk: Ludwig-Alexander "Alexander" Pavlovich Lanceray (1815-1869), a state councillor and railway engineer and the father of the sculptor Eugene Lanceray; and Zakhar Pavlovich (b. 1826), an army officer who founded the family's Ryazan branch.

For decades the family tradition held that "Lanceray" was an invented name, complete with a fanciful etymology - lance-rayon, "spear of the sun." The family research has refuted that legend: French records index some 797 Lanceray individuals reaching back to the early 1600s - a perfectly ordinary provincial family of artisans, farmers, and the occasional merchant, with the name documented in the Orne itself in the mid-eighteenth century.

The heaviest concentration of the name lies, remarkably, in the Brie at Crecy-la-Chapelle - a few kilometers from the Benois villages. The French cradles of the two emigre families, who would meet and intermarry in Russia, were neighbors.

Paul's grandson Eugene Alexandrovich Lanceray (1848-1886), without any formal art education, became one of Russia's most beloved sculptors, creating some four hundred bronze equestrian and ethnographic groups - horses, Cossacks, troikas, hunters, and scenes of steppe life. He traveled through Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and as far as Algeria, studying horses, riders, and harness at first hand.

In 1874 he married Ekaterina Benois, daughter of the Imperial architect - the marriage that joined the Lanceray line to the Benois-Cavos dynasty. In the 1880s he purchased the estate of Neskuchnoye near Kharkov, which would become the spiritual home of the next two generations. He died of tuberculosis in 1886, at thirty-seven, leaving six children - the youngest, Zinaida, then eighteen months old.

Yevgeny Yevgenievich Lanceray (1875-1946) became one of Russia's foremost graphic artists, a core member of the World of Art alongside his uncle Alexandre Benois; his illustrations to Tolstoy's Hadji Murat remain a summit of Russian book art. He recorded the Caucasian front as a painter in the First World War, lived in Dagestan and then Tiflis after the Revolution, and later in Moscow turned to monumental painting, including the ceilings of the Kazansky railway station; he received the Stalin Prize in 1943. It was Yevgeny who, visiting Paris in 1927, helped his exiled sister Zinaida secure her first proper apartment.

Nikolay Yevgenievich Lanceray (1879-1942), architect and architectural historian, met the darkest fate in the family: arrested in 1931 on fabricated charges, and again in 1938, he died in a Saratov prison hospital on May 6, 1942, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.

Their sisters Nina (1876-1913) and Tatiana (1878-1950) were both artists. The sculptor's children sustained the family's vocations into the Soviet era - one in honors, one in the camps - while the youngest, Zinaida, carried its painting tradition into exile.