SUMMARY:

In 1874, the artist Vasily Vereschagin published an album of photographic reproductions of his paintings from the “Turkestan series.” This project was commissioned by the first Turkestan governor-general, Konstantin P. von Kaufman. The article reviews this collaborative project by an artist and a high-ranking bureaucrat as an expression of the broader propaganda effort to legitimize Russia’s annexations in Central Asian. Still more important is the role of that album as an artifact of the international art market and art management of the epoch. New technologies of reproduction and dissemination of original art catered to the broadening public interest, and at the same time reflected the rise of realism as a dominant epistemological and ideological principle of the epoch.