Honoré DAUMIER

Most of Honoré Daumier’s surviving watercolours can be dated to the 1860s, when the artist produced finished works intended for sale to dealers and collectors. As Colta Ives has pointed out, ‘The medium of watercolor proved much more responsive to the artist’s hand than oil paint and allowed the vigor of his drawing to show through…It might be said that Daumier’s most finished watercolors of this period represent the surrender of his naturally unadorned draughtsmanship to the prejudices of current fashion.’ Daumier had a lifelong interest in the theatre and in theatre audiences, and a particular interest in studying a group of people watching a performance. As has been noted, ‘Spectators at the theatre was another subject which Daumier had treated often enough in lithographs, and which might have struck him as good for private sales of watercolours. An inveterate spectator himself, Daumier also liked to draw people watching each other…Daumier had been drawing cartoons of theatre audiences for Charivari during most of his career, but this subject is not found in his oil paintings and watercolours before about 1860.’

Datable to the first half of the 1860s, this exceptional watercolour - which has been aptly described as ‘stylistically and technically a very unusual drawing in Daumier’s oeuvre’ - is closely related to the artist’s sketchy, unfinished painting Orchestra Stalls (Fauteuils d’orchestre) of c.1865, today in the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio. Both works are unusual in Daumier’s oeuvre, as he rarely depicted elegantly dressed figures at the theatre, preferring to focus on ‘common’ spectators. A painting by Daumier of a similar subject, Une loge de théâtre, was formerly in the Robert Von Hirsch collection in Basel and was sold at auction in 1979, while a handful of other paintings of spectators at a theatre are known; in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, and elsewhere.

The Daumier scholar K. E. Maison has noted of the present sheet that ‘M. Adhémar very rightly comments on the resemblance of Manet’s pastel portraits of women to the treatment of the profiles in this watercolor. It is, of course, quite possible that Manet knew this study.’ Another scholar has further noted of this watercolour that ‘Color plays a far more important part in this work than in Daumier’s other watercolors. Furthermore, the work is fairly exceptional in its stress on feminine charms, not normally a preoccupation with this artist…In this watercolor, we find a more complex attitude, possibly hinting at secret longings. In front of two fashionable ladies, who are elegant enough but cold and unattractive, we are shown a somewhat languorous girl or young woman. The face, given in one-quarter view, has a lovely curving line; her cheek is smooth, the neck supple and unwrinkled. From her emanates an innate grace which, we feel, Daumier must have gazed at lovingly.’ Yet another writer, in one of the first published references to the present sheet, noted that ‘In this powerful study of physiognomies the modelling of the two men’s heads at the back is of surprising vigour.’

Daumier rarely portrayed women in his theatre subjects, which tend to focus almost exclusively on a masculine audience. In stylistic terms, this fine watercolour can be likened to a brush and ink drawing by Daumier of the profile of a woman, formerly in the collections of Claude Roger-Marx and Maurice Gobin, which is a study for the woman in the centre of the present composition. Also somewhat similar is an unfinished oil sketch by Daumier of the bust of a woman in profile, in the Dumbarton Oaks House Collection in Washington, D.C.

The first owner of the present sheet was French industrialist, engineer, painter and art collector Henri Rouart (1833-1912), who assembled a fine group of works by Daumier, amounting to thirteen paintings and some thirty-three drawings and watercolours. As noted in an article published shortly after the collector’s death, in which the present sheet was reproduced for the first time, ‘far-seeing as he always proved himself, M. Henri Rouart very early began to appreciate the genius of Daumier, and sought after his works with avidity…he realised that in Daumier we have an admirable painter who has created for himself an absolutely personal métier, and who has expressed with unequalled grandeur the passions of his great soul.’ Although included in the posthumous sale of Henri Rouart’s collection in 1912, this watercolour was acquired soon afterwards by his son Ernest Rouart (1874-1942), a painter and collector who had married Julie Manet, the daughter of Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet.