The Troubadour
Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)
1868–73
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 99.5 x 73 x 8 cm (39 3/16 x 28 3/4 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 83.6 x 56.8 cm (32 15/16 x 22 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The troubadour, a medieval traveling poet and entertainer, was a popular subject in 19th-century French art. Associated with chivalry and courtly love, the theme reflects a broader, romantic fascination with France's medieval past. Although Daumier was particularly inspired by the troubadour paintings of French Rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau of the 1700s, he rendered the subject here in a powerful style of simplified, muscular form that appealed to modern artists of his own time.
