Don Quixote’s Vigil

In 1855 Paris was busy admiring itself. The city was hosting its first great world's fair, the Exposition Universelle, all industry and empire under Napoleon III. Around then Daumier, a caricaturist by trade, was painting something quieter and much older in private: a scene from Cervantes, already two and a half centuries old. It shows Don Quixote keeping the vigil of arms. In the novel the deluded knight has piled his armour by a well in an inn yard he mistakes for a castle, and paces before it all night so he can be dubbed a knight at dawn. Daumier strips the story to almost nothing. A lone lance-bearing figure, the heaped armour, the dark. He would come back to Don Quixote for the rest of his life, some 25 oils and dozens of drawings, and this is one of the earliest of them.