Triumphant Advocate

Triumphant Advocate, dated around 1847 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, depicts a French lawyer in the moment of professional victory — the self-satisfied, strutting posture of a man who has just won his case and knows it. Daumier's lawyer subjects range from intimate professional consultation to public courtroom performance, and the triumphant advocate represents the theatrical public end of that spectrum: a man performing his success for an audience of colleagues, opponents, and the general public. The early date — 1847 — places this canvas in Daumier's initial period of sustained oil painting, when he was translating the observational and expressive powers he had developed as a lithographer into the different demands of painted canvas. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston holds an important group of Daumier paintings that spans his career. The triumphant lawyer's swelling chest and satisfied expression are rendered with the physical exaggeration that connects Daumier's painting to his caricaturist origins.

The single figure in triumphant pose creates a composition structured around the self-presentation of professional victory. Daumier handles the advocate's robes as they swell with the proprietorial expansion of a man satisfied with himself, using the volume of costume to amplify the self-importance.