Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier was a prolific caricaturist, painter, lithographer and sculptor and was especially renowned for satirical cartoons and drawings of 19th-century French politics and society. His subject matter was so broad and his observations so astute that one can gain a strong understanding on the issues of the lives of nineteenth-century Parisian bourgeois and working-class citizens. Apart from his many political caricatures, Daumier also covered subjects as far reaching as literature, the justice system, education, landlords and tenants, foreigners and other cultures, the art world and the world of theatre. The present work, Les Spectateurs, portrays one of the subjects he painted frequently – patrons of the performing arts. Oliver Larkin explains Daumier’s interest in the world of theatre ‘For him it was not merely a place of enchantment where people like himself could weep with the hero and laugh with the clown; behind its proscenium he could watch homely and pedestrian creatures try with no great success to transform themselves into the warriors of antiquity, the queens of Shakespeare and the desperadoes of Dumas and Victor Hugo. As a social satirist he could study the various forms of audience behaviour and as an artist he was delighted by the odd tricks which the footlights played on the forms behind them’ (O.W. Larkin, Daumier: Man of his Time, London, 1967, pp. 54-55).

The present work is related to another two drawings of a similar subject matter. The first is Pendant l’entr’acte à la Comédie Française and the second L’entracte, which is in  the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur (see: K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, Paris, 1968, vol. II, nos. 500 & 501).