The Chess players

Most people who knew Daumier's work in the 1860s knew it from newspapers. For decades he had turned out thousands of lithographs for the Paris press, mocking lawyers, politicians and the comfortable middle class, and that is how he earned his living. The painting he did on the side, like these two chess players bent over a board in a dim room, almost nobody saw. He worked it up around 1865 in loose, heavy strokes, more interested in the concentration of the two men than in any detail of the setting. Daumier's eyes were failing by then and money was short. When he died in 1879 he was nearly blind, and would have been buried in a pauper's grave had a few friends not stepped in.