Daumier, The Burden

Artists painted stark images of ordinary people as they struggled to survive in an industrializing age. Despite romantic views of a secluded separate sphere for women that was protected from life’s realities, the majority of women hardly enjoyed such an existence, as shown by this depiction of a weighted-down working woman and her child. Daumier was one of the artists who captured that reality. (National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic / photo by Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)