Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Man on a Rope
Honoré Daumier French
Not on view
The subject of these two paintings may be a house painter, since a bucket and a brush appear in a related drawing. In each we are witness to the artist’s process as he worked on the canvas. In the Ottawa painting there are signs of scraping and pentimenti (changes of mind), as well as squaring, which hint that the composition may have been transferred from another support. For the Boston version Daumier repurposed a canvas on which an earlier composition can still be glimpsed through the uppermost layers of paint. During his lifetime, Daumier was better known as a printmaker than a painter, and the function of these private, exploratory works remains unclear. The first known owner of both paintings was Nicolas-Auguste Hazard, whose interest in the artist culminated in his role as coauthor of the earliest catalogue raisonné of Daumier’s prints.
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