Deux enfants

Deux enfants (Two Children) belongs to Daumier's observation of childhood as a subject — the physical energy, unselfconscious behavior, and social relationships of children in the urban environment. Where many of his contemporaries treated childhood as a vehicle for sentimentality or domestic idealization, Daumier's children carry the same observational directness as his adults: they are physical beings caught in specific activities and relationships, neither idealized nor condescended to. Two children together create a social dynamic — friendship, competition, cooperation, or conflict — that Daumier could explore within the range of social behavior he observed throughout Parisian life. The subject may show children at play, at rest, or engaged in some activity that catches Daumier's eye for the specific and characteristic.

Children's proportions — the larger heads, the compact bodies, the specific physical energy of young figures — are observed with fidelity. Daumier handles the two figures in relation to each other, using their physical interaction or orientation to communicate the nature of their relationship.