The Print Collector

The Print Collector, dated around 1860 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts the absorbed engagement of a man with a portfolio of prints — a subject Daumier returned to multiple times across his career, always with a combination of gentle satire and genuine empathy. The print collector as social type occupied an important place in nineteenth-century French cultural life: collecting prints was accessible, intellectually respectable, and offered the pleasures of connoisseurship to those who could not afford to buy paintings. Daumier's version at the Art Institute is among the finest in oil, executed with the confident gestural handling of his mature period. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an important collection of French nineteenth-century painting and drawing, and this Daumier is among its significant holdings. The single absorbed figure, bent over his portfolio in a dim room surrounded by prints, represents the private, introspective dimension of Daumier's social observation — the moments of genuine pleasure, not only the comedy of social performance.

The composition focuses on a single figure bent in absorption over the print portfolio. Daumier builds the figure through broad tonal masses, using the warm light falling on the print and the collector's hands to create the compositional center, while the surrounding room recedes into warm darkness.