The Gossip

The Gossip depicts two or more figures engaged in the social exchange of information — the private whisper, the shared confidence, the transmission of news and opinion that constituted much of everyday social communication in nineteenth-century French life. Gossip as a social practice fascinated Daumier: it was the informal information network of bourgeois and working-class communities, the means by which reputation was made and destroyed, social bonds maintained and severed. Unlike the professional consultation of lawyers or the theatrical performance of courtroom advocacy, gossip was an amateur and domestic social technology, typically but not exclusively female in its social associations. Daumier's treatment of the subject connects to his lithographic work on female social life without reducing the subject to simple satire — the exchange of gossip is also genuine social connection, the circulation of interest and concern through a community.

The gossip composition is organized around the close physical configuration of two or more figures in low-voiced exchange. Daumier handles the faces and their combined downward or sideward tilt of shared communication with characteristic tonal economy.