Adolphe Martial Potémont

1828–1883, Paris

The landscape painter and etcher, Adolphe Potémont, who also used the pseudonym Martial, was trained by Léon Cogniet and Félix Brissot de Warville. Apart from a ten-year stay on the island of La Réunion, Potémont spent his entire life in Paris, which proved an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration to him. A large number of his etchings illustrate the changes his native city underwent during a period of great upheaval. He captured images of times past in his manifold urban views and a number of series comprising genre images of everyday life in the French capital.