Leaving the Theater is a rarity among Daumier's oils in being in such good condition.
The Parisian crowd, the movement and jostling of which Daumier suggests so well in his remarkably flowing technique, was a beloved subject of all the advocates of representing modern life in painting.
Daumier's crowd are lost in their own thoughts, not communicating with us or with one another. Familiar with the theatre from childhood (his father was an unsuccessful playwright), he made many prints of theatrical life, onstage, backstage, and in the audience.
In Leaving the Theater the humor with which he generally treated the subject in his prints is absent. Here Daumier presents us with the sobering effect of reality on an audience when the spell of theatrical illusion is broken; their entertainment over, they must return to a real world of darkness and cold, and to themselves.