Standing Soldier Holding a Rolled Flag

Standing Soldier Holding a Rolled Flag

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Loutherbourg, an Alsatian painter who studied etching in Johann Georg Wille’s academy, clearly admired the prints of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa, as did many other French printmakers of the time. In the set to which this print belongs (2018.52.1-6), entitled "First suite of Soldiers,"Loutherbourg took up a format associated with Rosa in order to showcase his own inventiveness and fluency.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Standing Soldier Holding a Rolled FlagStanding Soldier Holding a Rolled FlagStanding Soldier Holding a Rolled FlagStanding Soldier Holding a Rolled FlagStanding Soldier Holding a Rolled Flag

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.