The Drinkers

The Drinkers, painted around 1861 on panel and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, represents Daumier's observation of the working-class and lower-bourgeois culture of wine and alcohol consumption that was central to French social life. Drinking establishments were spaces of male sociability, release from labor, and communal entertainment across all social levels in nineteenth-century France, and Daumier had documented them extensively in his lithographic work before turning to oil. The subject connects to a tradition of northern European drinking scenes running from Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting through the French Realists, but Daumier's version is characterized by his particular emphasis on physical and psychological absorption: his drinkers are lost in their bottles and glasses with an intensity that excludes the outside world. The panel format and relatively small scale suit the intimate, observed quality of the subject. Daumier frequently worked on panel for these direct genre subjects, a support that allowed precise tonal control and rapid execution.

The figures are built from broad tonal masses of warm and cool paint, with faces modeled through the kind of rapid impasto that creates convincing expression without photographic detail. Daumier's palette here draws on ochres, umbers, and the warm transparency of wine-filled glasses.