This bronze composition from the collection of the Gorlovka Art Museum was made by the Russian sculptor-animalist Yevgeny Alexandrovich Lanceray (1848–1887). This artist devoted all his work to small forms and genre sculpture. Yevgeny Alexandrovich did not get a special art education. He was engaged in modeling mainly on his own, but sometimes received instructions from the sculptor Nikolai Ivanovich Lieberich, already well-known at that time.
The small sculptures of Yevgeny Alexandrovich amaze with the precision of the details. Lanceray was an excellent animalist, he beautifully depicted horses, in particular in historical subjects. In this, as his contemporaries wrote, he had no rivals. The sculptor traveled a lot, visited Italy, France, Great Britain, Austria, Algeria. He visited the Kyrgyz and Bashkir steppes, the Caucasus.
The artist was attracted to the worlds of nomadic peoples, their manners and customs. With great precision, he recreated folk costumes, horsemen’s equipment, their weapons, and household items. In total, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Lanceray created about 400 works. The desire to convey the slightest nuances of the appearance and movement of the characters with documentary accuracy became one of the distinctive features of his art. In his early works, the artist already chose a theme that he will be passionate about all his life.
The permanent exhibition of the Gorlovka Art Museum features the work “Arabic Horse Games, ” which the artist created after traveling to Algeria, where he was sent by the owner of the foundry Felix Chopin. This art piece is part of an Algerian cycle of works with very similar plasticity.
