Au bord de l'eau

Au bord de l'eau (By the Water) connects to Daumier's observation of leisure and everyday life at the edges of the Parisian urban environment — the riverbanks of the Seine and the recreational spaces along the water where Parisians of all classes came to fish, walk, row, or simply sit and watch the river go by. The Seine and its banks were important democratic public spaces in nineteenth-century Paris, accessible without payment and used by the working class and lower bourgeoisie for the modest outdoor leisure that their incomes permitted. Daumier had depicted fishing subjects, riverbank scenes, and water-adjacent leisure in lithographs throughout his career, finding in them the same quiet social comedy he brought to theaters and law courts. The specificity of the 'au bord de l'eau' setting — the river's reflective surface, the horizontal line of the bank, the figures arranged along the water — creates a compositional environment quite different from his enclosed interior subjects.

The riverbank setting creates a horizontal compositional structure with the water providing a reflective lower register and the sky an atmospheric upper register. Daumier places his figures along the bank, using the water's surface as a reflecting element that enriches the tonal environment.