This is one of the works in which Daumier's drawing is at its boldest. At the beginning of his career, he must have felt a certain fondness for untidy clothing and coarse language3ƒ4hangovers from his art-student years. When he was imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie, his fellow inmates called him "Gargantua" (his print of that name adorned many a cell) or "La Gouape"3ƒ4a slang term denoting someone who is lazy, slovenly, and drinks too much.

Certainly, he was not lazy3ƒ4witness his enormous output. It is by no means sure that he drank too much. We know that he liked to spend time in a little bistro on the Ile Saint-Louis (at the corner of the Rue de "la Femme sans T?te" and the Quai Bourbon) with his friends, the bargemen. He must also have joined Baudelaire often at a little café hard by the Moulin de Montsouris, at the outskirts of Paris near the Porte d'Orléans. Gavarni reports a visit to his studio, where he found men sitting on the floor around the stove, "each with his own bottle." Daumier was not a snob and probably sometimes offered his hospitality to the homeless of the riverfront3ƒ4a breed of down-and-outs notoriously fond of the bottle. All this, and perhaps the fact that he sometimes bragged about his alcoholic capacity, helped to create the legend (which Cézanne, for example, believed) of a drunkard Daumier. But the man to whom Delacroix wrote on May 16, 1850, "There are few men I respect and admire more than you," could never have been a drunkard.

The two drinkers portrayed here were conceived as an illustration of a passage from Baudelaire's Vin des Chiffonniers. (Jean Adhémar tells us that Daumier owned the manuscript of this poem.) Drunkenness has never been expressed more seriously. The figure at the left, who is trying to pull himself together, sticks out his chest and raises his elbow exaggeratedly to pour another drink. His clothes hang loosely on him; indeed, he seems about to lose his jacket. The man at the right is still further along, beginning to sink into an alcoholic stupor. He will fall off the bench in a moment....

Accession Number:

54.143.1 

Provenance:  

Charles Daubigny, Paris (gift of the artist; 1860–d. 1878); his widow, Mme Daubigny, Paris (from 1878, priced at Fr 600); Henri Rouart, Paris (by 1888–d. 1912; his estate sale, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Paris, December 9–11, 1912, no. 171, for Fr 35,000 to Knoedler); [Knoedler, New York, 1912–17; stock no. 13047; sold in January for $11,000 to Lewisohn]; Adolph Lewisohn, New York (1917–d. 1938; cat., 1928, p. 34, ill.); his son, Sam A. Lewisohn, New York (1938–d. 1951); his widow, Margaret S. Lewisohn, New York (1951–d. 1954)