Drawing’s Stepchild: How Lithography Transformed the Visual Universe of Nineteenth-Century France

Lithography was invented around 1800 as a commercial technology, but artists soon adopted it. They favored its immediacy over more traditional engraving, and it soon became the preferred medium for caricature, landscape and scenes of modern life, producing many of the nineteenth-century’s most memorable images. In “Drawing’s Stepchild,” Patricia Mainardi surveys the development of this medium from the simple line drawings of the early decades to the colorful posters of fin-de-siècle France.

Patricia Mainardi is a specialist in the art of the nineteenth century. Her book Another World: Nineteenth-Century European Print Culture was recently published by Yale University Press. Previous books include Art and Politics of the Second Empire; The End of the Salon; and Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, as well as numerous articles and museum catalogues. She is professor emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In English.

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