Portrait of a Woman and her Dog

Henri Bonaventure Monnier (1805–1877) was an actor and playwright as well as an artist. A contemporary of Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni, Monnier was a good-humored chronicler of French middle-class mores. He applied his considerable wit to satirizing the foibles and pretentions of his contemporaries and is best known for his creation of the character of Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme, a typical bourgeois—well-intentioned but stupid and pretentious, naïve and very verbose. Building on the success of his fictitious everyman, in the 1850s Monnier stepped on stage, bringing his character to life. The charming drawing of a woman reading bears no specific identification, but given her age and the intimacy of the scene, she may in fact be based on the artist’s wife.