The Two Colleagues (Lawyers)

The Two Colleagues (Lawyers), dated around 1867 and held at the Brooklyn Museum, belongs to Daumier's extensive documentation of the French legal profession — a satirical preoccupation that produced hundreds of lithographs and a significant body of oil paintings. French lawyers (avocats) were a prominent and often criticized social type in nineteenth-century Paris: their professional rhetoric, self-importance, and willingness to argue any position for a fee made them perfect subjects for Daumier's satirical intelligence. The consultation between two colleagues — sharing the strategies, gossip, or moral accommodations of their profession — allows Daumier to explore the dynamics of professional male conversation without a stage or audience. The Brooklyn Museum's holding places this work in the context of American collections of French Realism. Daumier's lawyer paintings occupy a continuous line from caricature to art: the exaggeration of physical type that served satire in lithography here becomes a mode of psychological characterization in paint.

The two-figure composition creates a dialogue structure — face to face, voice to voice — that Daumier handles through contrasting postures and a carefully managed spatial relationship between the figures.