National Galleries of Scotland

This is an unfinished picture, painted around 1858, and known since at least 1924 as 'The Serenade'. The subject is actually a strolling player singing in a garden restaurant. Daumier was fascinated by itinerant street performers and also drew and painted circus shows, carnivals and saltimbanques ? a common sight at street corners in nineteenth-century Paris. This kind of subject prefigures Degas?s and Manet?s modern life images of cafes-concerts which were a feature of their work in the 1870s.