RABOT Charles (EN)
Biographical article
Charles Rabot explored the far north of Russia at the end of the 19th century. After a first trip in 1880 to Norway and the North Cape, he traveled in 1884-1885 through Lapland, Spitsbergen and Greenland, to reach the White Sea in northern Russia followed by Arghangelsk. In 1890, he left Kazan, east of Moscow, travelling up the Volga then on the Kama (to east of Kirov), a tributary of the Volga. He descended the Ijma, towards the upper course of the Pechora, and studied the populations he encountered.
He then crossed the northern Ural mountain chain to reach the lower course of the Ob in Siberia, where he studied the Ostyak populations who “lived by hunting and fishing” (Delavaud, de Rialle, Rabot, Rambaud, 1892, p. 44-59).
The collection
Charles Rabot gave the collections he brought back from his first trip in 1885 to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Trocadero Ethnography Museum) (MDH, inv. 83.43.1 to 53): number M.E.T. 10074-10116 Lapland; number M.E.T. 12468-12476 Lapland; number M.E.T. 13,848 to 13,854 Lapland (entered the Trocadero on February 28, 1885); number M.E.T. 14,508 to 14,536 Lapland (entered the Trocadero on October 29, 1886); number M.E.T. 18,543 to 18,568 Lapland (entered the Trocadero on October 29, 1886); number M.E.T. 27,605 to 27,609 Iceland (entered Trocadero in December 1891).
The objects from the 1890-18912 expedition to Siberia were brought directly to the Musée Guimet on December 3, 1891, without going through the Trocadero collection. They were numbered Guimet 2,322 to 2,456, before joining Bordeaux around 1900.
They were exhibited in showcases 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35 at the Faculté de Médecine et de Pharmacie, alongside other objects, also brought from Sibera, from 1882 to 1886, by Joseph Martin (Martin J., 1888 ). On May 1, 1887, the Musée Guimet prepared an inventory of the 128 pieces received from the Martin collection (Vivez J., June 1977), which the museum sent to Bordeaux. The Ethnography section of the Muséum de Lyon also conserved the Siberian collections of engineer Joseph Martin. Eighteen photographic plates taken by him were registered at the Société de Géographie in Paris on April 15, 1887.
The catalogue Les collections de l’Europe Arctique du musée d’Ethnographie de l’Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 1996, lists 123 objects from Rabot’s Siberia collection, without specifying the numbers of the 1892 registration of the Musée Guimet.
