Man on a Rope

Nobody is sure what this man is doing. He clings to a rope, and the picture has been read two ways, as a prisoner's dangerous escape or as something entirely ordinary, a house painter lowered down a wall to work. A bucket and a brush in a related drawing tip the balance toward the painter, though the canvas itself does not settle it. Daumier made it around 1858 and left it unfinished. A second, closely related version exists, and for a while the two travelled together. Both belonged to the collector Nicolas-Auguste Hazard, and at his posthumous sale in Paris in December 1919 the Galerie Barbazanges bought them as consecutive lots. The other is now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. This one was bought for Boston at a New York auction in January 1943.