This spontaneous sketch is one of the most interesting of all types of portraiture--that of an artist painting his fellow artist. Here, Corot has depicted his close friend, Daumier, working on a lithographic stone. He is shown in profile drawing on a thick slab of limestone which has been propped up on the surface of a table or desk. The basic monochromatic color scheme of various shades of brown is offset by Corot's traditional use of red for the collar and cuffs of Daumier's shirt.

Towards the end of his life, Daumier's sight began to fail and he suffered from partial and intermittent blindness. The income from the sale of his lithographs was reduced. It was rumored that in 1871 Daubigny lent his ailing friend 750 francs, and Corot's biographer, Moreau-Nelaton, recorded that Corot purchased for Daumier the small house in the tiny village of Valondois, in the valley of the Oise, where Millet and Rousseau had come to dine with the Daumiers twenty years earlier (for a photograph of this house see O. Larkin, Daumier, Man of His Time, New York, 1966, p. 159, fig. 76).

It has often been thought that Daumier also painted Corot in the figure of the man reading under a tree in a beautiful watercolor from around 1870 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We are grateful to Martin Dieterle for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.