Two Children Reaching for Fruit

Two Children Reaching for Fruit, dated around 1845 and held at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, belongs to an early phase of Daumier's oil painting practice, when he was extending his range from his established lithographic career into broader pictorial subjects. Children reaching for fruit is a subject with roots in Dutch and Flemish genre painting and connects to the tradition of depicting childhood as a time of uncomplicated physical appetite and play. Daumier's treatment would have focused on the physical energy of the reaching gesture and the children's absorbed concentration on their objective — the kind of unselfconscious behavior that his observational practice found compelling in adults and children alike. The Tokyo museum's holding of this early work alongside later examples of his art allows a developmental perspective on his career. The early date suggests this predates Daumier's mature gestural style; the handling would be somewhat more controlled than his later broadly brushed work.

The subject requires Daumier to render children's bodies in physically active poses — the characteristic energy of childhood movement. His early technique here would manage tonal relationships with more careful attention to surface than his later mature work, building the figures' forms through.