Horsemen

Daumier's Horsemen, dated around 1855 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, depicts figures on horseback in movement through a landscape. Equestrian subjects occupied a place in Daumier's observation of French life ranging from the satirical — the bourgeois rider making an undignified figure on an uncooperative horse, a subject he had worked with extensively in lithographs — to the more straightforwardly dynamic, where horses and riders move through landscape with a sense of energy and purpose. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston holds an important group of French nineteenth-century paintings, and this canvas sits within its broader Daumier holdings. The equestrian subject in the 1850s connects to Daumier's knowledge of both Delacroix's dramatic horse subjects and the English sporting tradition that had influenced French painting through the work of Géricault. His treatment, however, tends toward observation of everyday riding rather than the heroic or the comic extremes.

Horses in motion present a compositional challenge of implied movement within a static canvas. Daumier handles the bodies of horse and rider through broad tonal forms that suggest mass and momentum, using a loose, directional brushwork that captures movement more effectively than precise anatomical.