Two Lawyers

Honoré-Victorin Daumier · c. 1860

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

13.3 × 14.6 cm (5 1/4 × 5 3/4 in.); Framed: 26.7 × 28 × 4.5 cm (10 1/2 × 11 × 1 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Daumier's *Two Lawyers* catches its subjects mid-conversation with the kind of sharp, half-comic observation that made him one of the most perceptive social recorders of nineteenth-century France. Best known as a lithographer and caricaturist, Daumier brought the same unflinching eye to paint that he applied to the press. His brushwork is loose and gestural — forms emerge from shadow rather than being rendered with academic precision — giving the panel an energy that feels almost modern. The lawyers here are types as much as individuals: self-important, absorbed in their own rhetoric, observed with wry sympathy rather than outright contempt. Daumier returned to legal subjects repeatedly throughout his career, having spent time in the courts himself after a brief imprisonment in 1832 for a caricature of King Louis-Philippe. His paintings remained largely unknown to the public during his lifetime; it was his prints that made him famous, and the canvases and panels were only fully appreciated after his death. This hand-painted oil reproduction on panel preserves the tonal warmth and painterly looseness of the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago — the kind of qualities that photographic prints flatten but a skilled painter, working in the same medium, can faithfully carry forward.