Daumieralways had great respect for men who do hard work . Men at their work provided him with expressive subjects which enabled him to make use of his astonishing knowledge of anatomy and to give free rein to that sense of the epic which is so often discernible in his art .
Here , he recorded the motions of a man climbing up a rope suspended in front of a wall or a drain. The man hangs in mid-air , and all his muscles are engaged . The drawing (particularly in the right forearm and the right leg extended beside he rope) expresses dramatically the dangerousness of this kind of work.
Intensive people would see here nothing but a commonplace scene in the construction worker's life . And yet does not these dramatic figure a irresistibly evoke Victor Hugo's magnificent lines in his Burgraves , where he speaks of those who clamber up walls as "Not so much men as demons. Twisted by the wind and the night on the mountain side."