The Painting-Lovers

The Painting-Lovers, dated around 1862 and held at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, depicts the bourgeois collectors and connoisseurs who haunted dealers, print sellers, and auction rooms in nineteenth-century Paris. Daumier had documented this social type extensively in his lithographic work — the amateur who considers himself a judge of art, the collector who buys paintings as status objects, the dealer who navigates between them — and this oil painting translates that satirical observation into a more intimate, reflective medium. The painting-lovers' absorption before a canvas they are examining creates a comedy of vanity and aspiration: they are performing appreciation as much as experiencing it. The Rotterdam museum, which holds important works of Dutch and Flemish as well as French painting, acquired this panel as part of its collection of nineteenth-century French art. Daumier's sympathy is with the genuine encounter between viewer and artwork, not with the social performance that typically surrounds it.

The figures examining a painting create a compositional triangle of viewer, viewed-object, and implied work on the wall. Daumier handles the connoisseurs' absorbed postures — leaning in, gesturing — with characteristic gestural economy, the physical attitudes communicating the comedy of performed.