Private, 3rd Regiment, Massachusetts, V.M., from the Military Series (N224) issued by Kinney Tobacco Company to promote Sweet Caporal Cigarettes 1888

This chromolithograph was created by Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company around 1888 as part of a series of promotional cards. The composition is dominated by the figure of a soldier, rendered with a crisp, graphic precision that emphasizes shape and color over depth. The palette is restrained, featuring muted blues, reds, and yellows, which, when combined with the soldier’s static pose, create a sense of formality and distance. Kinney Brothers disrupt traditional portraiture through the piece's structural elements. The soldier's figure is rigidly centered, dividing the pictorial space into symmetrical halves, which flattens the image and reduces any sense of narrative depth. This flattening rejects established conventions of realism and instead explores surface and pattern. The card's aesthetic functions as both a promotional tool and an engagement with broader questions of representation and identity in a rapidly industrializing America. Through its formal choices, this piece invites us to consider how meaning is constructed through repetition, symmetry, and the careful arrangement of visual elements.