Chat échaudé craint l'eau froide
19th century
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
Sheet: 10 7/16 x 7 13/16 in. (26.5 x 19.8 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Helen J. Baker, 1937
Accession Number
37.68.24
Tags
Art Historical Context
Victor Adam's *Chat échaudéaint l'eau froide*A Scalded Cat Fears Cold Water a 19th-centuryograph, captures a timeless French proverb illustrating caution born from past trauma. Produced during lithography's golden age, this print depicts men and women in a lively genre scene, likely evoking everyday Parisian life with Adam's signature wit and observation. Adam (1801–1865), a prolific French artist, specialized in humorous illustrations of proverbs and social vignettes, bridging Romanticism's expressiveness with emerging Realism. Lithography, invented around 1796, revolutionized printmaking by...
About the Artist
Victor Adam · 1801–1866
Victor Adam was born in Paris in 1801 and built a prolific and commercially successful career as one of the leading lithographers and illustrators of nineteenth-century France. He received a conventional academic training in painting, but it was the new medium of lithography — still in its first decades of widespread use when Adam came of age — that provided the ideal vehicle for his gifts: a faci...