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"Oh! It is as if we were there: the tall one opens her corset and the little one is looking for a flea!," plate 27 from Types Parisiens

A work made of lithograph in black on white wove paper.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • A work made of lithograph in black on white wove paper.

Date:

1840

Artist:

Honoré Victorin Daumier
French, 1808-1879

About this artwork

Honoré Daumier’s comic voyeurs go to great lengths to spy on their female neighbors, even resorting to a telescope. While the viewer sees the observers rather than the unaware, disrobing women, the excited narration fills in details about the vermin-ridden objects of their desires. Women’s undergarments would become increasingly showy by the 1870s, with bold colors adopted by courtesans and prostitutes. As Eugène Chapus noted in his 1862 work Manuel de l’homme et de la femme comme il faut (Manual of the Elegant Man and Woman), “A woman in a corset is a lie, a falsehood, a fiction, but for us this fiction is better than the reality.”

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Prints and Drawings

Artist

Honoré-Victorin Daumier

Title

"Oh! It is as if we were there: the tall one opens her corset and the little one is looking for a flea!," plate 27 from Types Parisiens

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1840

Medium

Lithograph in black on white wove paper

Dimensions

Image: 19 × 24.2 cm (7 1/2 × 9 9/16 in.); Sheet: 24.6 × 35.6 cm (9 11/16 × 14 1/16 in.)

Credit Line

The Hannan Fund

Reference Number

1935.41

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/21061/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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