Three gossips

The drawing shows three women gossiping at night by the light of a candle. The woman on the right is talking to her companions while emphatically gesticulating, while the other two are listening and showing expressions of fear and surprise. The scene is depicted with immediacy and theatricality at the same time, characteristic of Daumier’s ability to acutely observe and represent human passions. The composition is known in two other versions, one at the Art Institute of Chicago (1988.141.25; Maison, op. cit., no. 694, ill.) and the other at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (CAI 122; ibid., no. 695, ill.). Both of the other versions are sketchier and executed in a linear style, lacking the drama created by the abundant black wash Daumier used in the present drawing. A watercolor with a full-length version of the scene is also known (Sotheby’s, London, 5 December 1990, lot 303). The three drawings and the watercolor all differ in many details and are somewhat connected to a lithograph, Madame Fribochon, published in the Charivari on 17 March 1852 (L. Delteil, Honoré Daumier, Paris, 1926, VIII, no. 2263). The subject of the gossips was reemployed by Daumier also in a later lithograph, The Comet of 1857, published in 1857 (ibid., no. 2925).