Soldiers (3 prints of varying size pasted onto a green sheet)
mid–19th century
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
Mount: 12 x 3 7/16 in. (30.5 x 8.8 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Dr. Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher, 2012
Accession Number
2012.401.6a–c
Tags
Art Historical Context
Victor Adam's *Soldiers*, a mid-19th-century lithograph, captures the vibrancy of military life through three prints of varying sizes cleverly pasted onto a single green sheet. Measuring just 12 x 3 7/16 inches on its mount, this intimate work showcases Adam's skill as a French lithographer renowned for his dynamic depictions of soldiers, horses, and everyday scenes from Parisian streets. Lithography, a revolutionary printing technique perfected in the early 1800s, allowed artists like Adam to produce detailed, tonal images affordably, making art accessible beyond elite circles. The compositi...
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...