Theater Audience

Daumier's fascination with theatrical audiences — the spectators rather than the performers — runs through many of his paintings and drawings. Theater Audience, dated around 1856 and now at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, captures the collective spectacle of a French audience gripped by or merely exposed to a performance. The theater as a social institution interested Daumier as a space where the performance observed from stage competed with the social performance happening in the stalls, boxes, and gallery — where watching and being watched operated simultaneously. Japanese collections of French nineteenth-century painting are a significant legacy of the Meiji-era enthusiasm for European art, and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo houses an outstanding collection of French Realist and Impressionist works. Daumier's panel paintings of theater subjects are closely related to his lithographic work on the same themes, where theatrical audiences had been a staple of social satire since the 1830s.

The theater interior presents Daumier with a multi-level space of boxes, stalls, and gallery filled with figures in various states of attention. He uses the contrast between the lit faces of the audience and the dark background of the interior to create a pattern of distributed attention across the.