Don Quixote and the Dead Mule

Somewhere in the Sierra Morena, in Cervantes's novel, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come upon a dead mule, half-rotted after weeks alone in the hills, and near it a valise of gold coins left behind by a man who has lost his mind and taken to the rocks. Daumier painted that bleak little discovery more than once. Here the two riders are barely more than smudges of brown on a pale, empty slope, and the dead animal on the ground takes up almost as much of the picture as the knight himself. There is nothing comic in it, none of the lance-at-the-windmills Quixote most people carry in their heads. Daumier worked these Cervantes scenes as thin, fast oil sketches, laying the paint down in a few loaded strokes and leaving the canvas nearly bare where the hillside should be. The mule, given more attention than anything else in the frame, is the thing your eye keeps going back to.