Dom Quixote e Sancho Pança

By the late 1860s Honoré Daumier had spent 40 years as France's sharpest political caricaturist, and the work was drying up. His eyesight was failing and the satirical papers that hired him kept being censored, so around 1868 he turned almost privately to oil paint. He came back to Don Quixote over and over, roughly two dozen times in all. Here the knight is a thin vertical figure on a horse stretched nearly to a skeleton, with Sancho a heavy shape behind him. Almost nothing is brought to finish. The hills are wiped in and the faces barely set down. Daumier isn't retelling Cervantes. He holds onto one image, the gaunt idealist riding ahead of his stout, earthbound servant, and paints it like a man working more from memory than from sight.