Das Melodram

Honore Daumier made his living with a lithographic stone, turning out thousands of prints for the Paris papers, and his paintings were something he did more privately, seen by few while he was alive. Around 1860 he kept going back to the cheap melodramas that packed the city's theatres. Here he does the surprising thing and turns his back on the stage. The actors are barely there. What he paints is the audience, faces tipped up out of the dark and lit from below by the footlights, caught somewhere between fear and delight. He builds the whole thing from browns and blacks, so the light doing the work is the same stage glow the crowd has paid to sit in.