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Lot Essay
In 1846, Daumier moved to 9 quai d'Anjou on Paris's Ile Saint-Louis. In the period that followed, the artist, better known for his caricatures of barristers and theatrical scenes of saltimbanques, turned toward the city's working class citizens. From the crowded riders of a third-class railway carriage to the local butcher, Daumier began to create what Gen Doy has called "icon[s] of modern drudgery" (P. Wood, ed., "Material Differences: The Early Avant-Garde in France" in The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, 1999, p. 65).
It was Daumier's habit to revisit a composition of interest multiple times. Sarah Symmons has noted that the subject of the present work was likely, "close to Daumier's own heart, [as] this woman and child spilled over into five paintings, a sculptured figure and some five known drawings" (Daumier, London, 2004, p. 92).
More generally, the subject of the washerwoman is treated in some thirteen other paintings by the artist, including the closely related composition Une laveuse du quai d'Anjou, the three versions of which belong to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-159), the Louvre, Paris (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-160) and the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-84). While these related works are most often named for the laundress herself, the title of the present composition points directly to the load she bears; Le Fardeau can be translated as "the burden."
Oliver Larkin focused on the artist's attempt to capture in oil what he had first established in "the complex movement of the terracotta figurine" (Daumier: Man of His Time, 1966, p. 135). The tremendous sense of weight with which Daumier renders the painting's bundle, and the dramatic torsion this causes in the figure of the laundress, can likely be attributed to the artist's earlier experience with the subject in three-dimensional materiality.
It is the weightiness of the figures themselves that has encouraged scholars to align Daumier's canvases with other nineteenth century illustrations of labor. According to Henri Loyrette, "Daumier's exhausted laundresses, anonymous figures of poverty, display the same slow gestures, the same bowed forms, the same weight and compactness as Millet's gleaners." And it is this sensitivity to the quotidian reality of the underclass which lends both painters' work "a universal dimension, raising what could have remained mere genre painting, picturesque and sentimental, to the level of history painting" ("Situating Daumier," Daumier: 1808-1879, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1999, p. 17).
It was Daumier's habit to revisit a composition of interest multiple times. Sarah Symmons has noted that the subject of the present work was likely, "close to Daumier's own heart, [as] this woman and child spilled over into five paintings, a sculptured figure and some five known drawings" (Daumier, London, 2004, p. 92).
More generally, the subject of the washerwoman is treated in some thirteen other paintings by the artist, including the closely related composition Une laveuse du quai d'Anjou, the three versions of which belong to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-159), the Louvre, Paris (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-160) and the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo (K.E. Maison, vol. I, I-84). While these related works are most often named for the laundress herself, the title of the present composition points directly to the load she bears; Le Fardeau can be translated as "the burden."
Oliver Larkin focused on the artist's attempt to capture in oil what he had first established in "the complex movement of the terracotta figurine" (Daumier: Man of His Time, 1966, p. 135). The tremendous sense of weight with which Daumier renders the painting's bundle, and the dramatic torsion this causes in the figure of the laundress, can likely be attributed to the artist's earlier experience with the subject in three-dimensional materiality.
It is the weightiness of the figures themselves that has encouraged scholars to align Daumier's canvases with other nineteenth century illustrations of labor. According to Henri Loyrette, "Daumier's exhausted laundresses, anonymous figures of poverty, display the same slow gestures, the same bowed forms, the same weight and compactness as Millet's gleaners." And it is this sensitivity to the quotidian reality of the underclass which lends both painters' work "a universal dimension, raising what could have remained mere genre painting, picturesque and sentimental, to the level of history painting" ("Situating Daumier," Daumier: 1808-1879, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1999, p. 17).