Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt (1809): Art, History and Details

Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt (1809) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Dominique Vivant Denon (French, 1747–1825).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Lithography was discovered in 1798 in Germany by Alois Senefelder (1771-1834), whose efforts to find an inexpensive method to reproduce the text of his plays accidentally led to a new and revolutionary way of printing. Although lithographs were almost immediately produced in Germany and England, the artists of France were the first to appreciate the aesthetic potentialities of this most flexible, responsive, and personal medium. In 1806, one of Napoleon's generals, Baron Lejeune, an amateur painter, was impressed by the technique while in Munich. Upon his return to Paris, he succeeded in introducing a few artists to the method, and by 1811 Denon's studio had become a fashionable center of lithography for amateurs.

Object facts

• Title: Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt
• Date: 1809
• Creator attribution: Dominique Vivant Denon (French, 1747–1825)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: lithograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 23.7 x 19.2 cm (9 5/16 x 7 9/16 in.); Image: 9.7 x 14.1 cm (3 13/16 x 5 9/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1940.1097

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis B. Williams Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of an exhibition of the art of lithography: commemorating the sesquicentennial of its invention, 1798-1948. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, November 11, 1948-January 2, 1949.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.