René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, printer's sample for the World's Inventors souvenir album (A25) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes
1888
Medium
Commercial color lithograph
Dimensions
Sheet: 2 3/4 x 1 1/2 in. (7 x 3.8 cm)
Classification
Prints|Ephemera
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick
Accession Number
63.350.202.25.36
Tags
Art Historical Context
This petite chromolithograph, a printer's sample from Allen & Ginter's 1888 *World's Inventors* souvenir album (series A25), captures the of René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757), the French polymath who devised the Réaumur temperature scale and advanced metallurgy and entomology. Measuring just 2¾ × 1½ inches, it was designed as a collectible insert for cigarette packs, blending portraiture with clever marketing. Allen & Ginter, pioneering tobacco innovators, popularized trading cards in the Gilded Age, enticing smokers with educational vignettes of luminaries. This ephemera exemplif...
About the Artist
Allen & Ginter
Allen & Ginter, the pioneering American tobacco firm based in Richmond, Virginia, emerged around 1880 from the partnership of John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter, evolving from Allen's earlier John F. Allen & Company. Allen retired in 1882, succeeded by John Pope, yet the brand endured under Ginter's leadership, employing over 1,100 workers—mostly women—for hand-rolled cigarettes by 1886. Ginter, a Dut...