The Lovers Of Painting - Daumier - Around 1850 1860 -

This painting is listed in the Daumier Register under the number DR13277

Daumier began to explore the theme of art connoisseurs in the late 1850s.

The artist produced at least thirty works that deal with this motif. This work takes us into the lair of an art gallery, like those that flourished around the Hôtel Drouot after its opening in 1852. Daumier was a regular visitor to such places, and a keen observer of Balzac's France; of the tumultuous daily life of the city of Paris in full mutation that the writer described so astutely in his novels published at the time.

Daumier was particularly sensitive to the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, which gave rise to new amateurs and collectors of all kinds. He himself was very well integrated into the artistic and intellectual circles of the capital. He was a friend of Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier, among others. They met at the famous soirées organized by the Club des Haschischiens at the Hôtel de Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis, next to the artist's residence. In Les Amateurs de tableaux, Daumier did not resort to the conventions of satire, which otherwise permeate his work. Instead, he ventured into the realm of realist painting by depicting a scene from contemporary Parisian life whose style and subject matter departed from the classical canons of academic painting.

In this work, he clearly went beyond his scathing caricatures. Daumier himself, in one of his rare recorded maxims, clearly stated: "One must live with one's time!" » (Arsène Alexandre, Honoré Daumier, the man and the work, Paris, 1888, p.203)