École Réaliste Sociale Française (XIX) - Le Dipsomane

- Oil on canvas. Original canvas.

- In the wake of the sublime and disturbing portraits of fanatics and the alienated by Théodore Géricault, this stark and relentless image of a worker marked by alcoholism transcends mere individual pathology to take on a depth of sociological and naturalist testimony. The work condemns, with uncompromising pictorial force, not only the abject social alienation and the inevitable physical deterioration caused by excessive drinking, but also the distorted economic structure that feeds and perpetuates the misery of the working masses.

This man, whose face reflects existential despair, seems lifted straight from the pages of Émile Zola, embodying the biological and social fatalism that literary naturalism exposed with brutal honesty. The painting becomes a visual echo of Hippolyte Taine's theories on the determinism of milieu and race, and resonates with Émile Durkheim's studies on social anomie. By showing the worker inevitably steered toward the single precarious "antidote" to class suffering, the work aligns with sociological critique that saw alcoholism as a direct consequence of exploitation and industrial dehumanization, making this portrait a social denunciation as eloquent as any naturalist treatise or novel, and a masterwork of late nineteenth-century social realism.

- Image dimensions unframed: 36 x 48 cm / 54.5 x 64 cm with a magnificent late 19th-century custom-made French carved and gilded wood frame.

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