Two Singers

Two Singers depicts a performance subject in which voices rather than instruments are the musical medium — a subject that connects to Daumier's larger documentation of musical performance, whether in the opera house, the café concert, or the popular entertainment venue. Singing was among the most socially varied of musical activities in nineteenth-century France: the grand opera with its trained soloists, the popular café concert with its chansonniers, and the private salon with its amateur performers all occupied different social spaces that Daumier mapped with his characteristic observational range. Two singers together create a compositional subject of vocal interaction — harmony, dialogue, or competition — that Daumier can express through physical proximity, the direction of mouths and eyes, and the implied sound that the image cannot contain but that the viewing imagination supplies.

The two singing figures create a composition structured around open mouths and forward-directed sound — a visual challenge since singing is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. Daumier handles the performers through posture and the expressive configuration of faces in active vocal production.