Don Quixote reading

Don Quixote Reading, dated around 1867 and held at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, shows the knight absorbed in the chivalric romances that, in Cervantes's novel, drove him to his noble and futile quest. The reading subject is central to Cervantes's narrative: Quixote's madness began with excessive reading, and his library — mostly burned by his well-meaning friends — was the origin of his transformation from minor gentleman to knight errant. Daumier's depiction of Quixote reading therefore represents the origin of the knight's entire story: the moment at which imagination overcomes reality. The National Gallery of Victoria, which holds important works of European painting in the context of an Australian national collection, acquired this panel as part of its French nineteenth-century holdings. Daumier's engagement with the Quixote reading subject allows him to show the knight in his most private, formative moment — the absorption in text that preceded all his adventures.

The reading figure creates a focused arrangement — a bent head, a held book, the absorbed posture of a reader lost in text. Daumier handles Quixote's elongated form bent over his reading with the same physical exaggeration that characterizes all his treatments of the knight.