The Print Amateur

The Print Amateur belongs to Daumier's extensive treatment of the culture of print collecting and connoisseurship in nineteenth-century Paris. The print amateur — the enthusiast who haunts dealers and auction rooms, who maintains portfolios of accumulated acquisitions, who judges impressions and states with absorbed expertise — was a social type that fascinated Daumier both as a satirical target and as an expression of genuine visual passion. His treatment of print collecting was complicated by his own position as a major print artist: he understood the collector's love for graphic art from the producer's side, and this gave his depictions a quality of empathy that moderated the potential for satire. The print amateur's absorbed study of his acquisitions — the bent posture, the held print, the private pleasure of close examination — creates Daumier's characteristic image of individual absorption that he found equally in readers, chess players, and print collectors.

The print amateur's absorbed examination creates a composition structured around the figure bent over the object of attention. Daumier handles the warm, contained environment of the collector's study through his characteristic tonal approach, using warm interior light to illuminate the print and.