Dessins et peintures d'Asie.

£7,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Beiruit to Beijing - the Citroen Central Asia Expedition Finely produced portfolio of illustrations by the official artist of the Citroen Central Asia Expedition, capturing the peoples and landscapes of Persia, Turkistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia. The third Citroen mission, The Yellow Cruise, took place between April 1931 and February 1932. This motorised expedition followed Citroen's previous successful mission across the Sahara and The Black Cruise in Central Africa. This time the route went across Asia from Beirut to Beijing, amounting to 13,000 km. It was the first time anyone had driven a car in the Himalayas and the convoy also set the world altitude record for cars - 4208m - in the process. Yakovlev produced a captivating record of the peoples he saw on the route, including Persians, Mongolians, Kyrghyzs and Afghans. By the artist's own admission, it was the interesting characters in traditional attire that he most enjoyed drawing, especially those with distinctive head-dresses. Yakovlev was particularly fascinated with the Baghdadi Kurds, a people whose proud and dignified air Yakovlev found very attractive: 'If I hadn't known that the Baghdadi Kurds who came to pose for me were just porters handling supplies for the expedition,' Yakovlev wrote, 'I could easily have mistaken them for descendants of the princes of One Thousand and One Nights' (A.Yakovlev, Putevye zapiski o puteshestvii po Azii v ekspeditsii avtomobil'nogo obshchestva 'Sitroen', 25 April 1931). Born in

• Binding: Hardcover

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