The Imaginary Illness

The Imaginary Illness, dated around 1860 and held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, engages the theme of hypochondria and medical consultation that Daumier had extensively explored in his lithographic work. The imaginary invalid — convinced of illness in the absence of real disease — was a social type with a long history in French satire, most famously in Molière's Le Malade imaginaire. Daumier's treatment allows him to observe both the patient's performance of illness and the doctor's response — skeptical, indulgent, or professionally attentive to the paying client regardless of real diagnosis. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection of French painting provides a strong context for this work, with particular depth in the nineteenth-century period. The subject combines Daumier's medical satire — doctors were a frequent target of his lithographic wit — with his social comedy: the bourgeois man who has discovered illness as a mode of social attention and domestic tyranny.

The consultation scene positions patient and doctor in a domestic interior, their relationship established through posture and expression. Daumier handles the patient's prone or distressed pose against the doctor's standing professional authority, using the room's furnishings to establish the.