Os bashkires

William Allan was a Scot who spent nearly a decade in Russia, from 1805 to 1814, travelling through its southern and eastern edges and filling sketchbooks with the peoples he met. Back home he turned that material into scenes like this one of Bashkirs, the horsemen from the steppe east of the Volga who served in the Russian army as irregular cavalry. He finished it in 1814, the year Russian forces, Bashkir riders among them, entered Paris at the close of the wars against Napoleon. Allan prided himself on getting the details right, the dress, the harness, the weapons, more ethnographer than dramatist. Two years later the young Grand Duke Nikolai, the future Tsar Nicholas the First, walked into Allan's Edinburgh studio and bought several of his Russian pictures for a palace in Saint Petersburg.