Honoré Daumier

Honoré-Victorin Daumier (; 26 February 1808 – 10 or 11 February 1879) was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870. He earned a living producing caricatures and cartoons in newspapers and periodicals such as La Caricature and Le Charivari, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still remembered today. He was a republican democrat (working class liberal), who satirized and lampooned the monarchy, aristocracy, clergy, politicians, the judiciary, lawyers, police, detectives, the wealthy, the military, the bourgeoisie, as well as his countrymen and human nature in general.

Daumier was a serious painter, loosely associated with realism, sometimes blurring the boundaries between caricature and fine art. Although he occasionally exhibited at the Parisian Salon, his paintings were largely overlooked and ignored by the French public and critics of the day. Yet Daumier's fellow painters, as well as the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, noticed and greatly admired his work. Later generations would recognize Daumier as one of the great French artists of the 19th century, profoundly influencing a younger generation of impressionist and postimpressionist painters. Daumier was a tireless and prolific artist and produced more than 100 sculptures, 500 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 1,000 wood engravings, and 4,000 lithographs.

Daumier came from a poor family and was working by the age of 12, first at a , then at a bookstore frequented by artists where he began to draw. He received some mentorship from Alexandre Lenoir, attended the Académie Suisse, learned lithography, and was producing advertisements, illustrations, and caricatures by the time he was twenty. After the July Revolution of 1830 he begin working for satirical political papers that were highly critical of the new monarch Louis Philippe I and his court. He was jailed for several months in 1832 after the publication of Gargantua, a particularly offensive depiction of the King, Louis Philippe. After his release Daumier resumed publishing political lithographs until the September Laws were passed in 1835, limiting the freedom of the press. Afterwards, his cartoons softened, the bourgeoisie and daily Parisian life were more frequent subjects, and when political subjects did appear they were oblique and veiled. Daumier experienced financial hardships and debt throughout much of his life.

Daumier married Alexandrine Dassy in 1846 and moved to the Île Saint-Louis where they lived until 1863. He increasingly associated with writers, poets, painters, and sculptors there, including Baudelaire, Corot, Courbet, Delacroix among others, and began to paint in earnest. He spent his summers from 1853 onward in Barbizon and Valmondois, where artists of the Barbizon school and realist movement worked. As his desire to paint intensified, his enthusiasm for cartooning declined, as did his popularity with the public. Le Charivari stopped publishing his comics in 1860. A period of financial hardship followed, and from 1863–1865 he moved to a series of lodgings around Montmartre and lost contact with many friends. Le Charivari gave him a new contract in 1864 and he resumed making caricatures for an appreciative audience in Paris. Daumier moved to Valmondois in 1865. He experienced failing eyesight and poverty there, although he continued to produce lithographs and paint, often on the theme of Don Quixote. The French Third Republic granted him a pension in 1877, and the following year a major exhibition of his paintings was held in Paris, which received significant recognition in the final months of his life. Daumier died in February 1879. Various sources give conflicting dates regarding the day of his death: some state 10 February 1879, others 11 February.

Life Early life: 1808–1830

Daumier was born in the south of France, in Marseille, to Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier and Cécile Catherine Philippe. His father Jean-Baptiste was a glazier (corresponding nowadays to a framer), a poet and a minor playwright whose literary aspirations led him to move to Paris in 1814, followed by his wife and the young Daumier in 1816. Although Daumier's father succeeded in publishing a book of verse and having an amateur troupe of actors perform his play in 1819, financial success was minimal and the family lived in poverty. At about the age of twelve (–21), Daumier started to work because of his father's breakdown. In 1822 he became protégé to Alexandre Lenoir, a friend of Daumier's father and the founder of the Musée des Monuments Francais (now Musée national des Monuments Français), who trained Daumier in the fundamentals of art. The following year he entered the Académie Suisse where he was able to draw from live models and develop friendships with other students including Philippe Auguste Jeanron and Auguste Raffet.

Lithography was a relatively new form of printmaking in the early 19th century, invented in Germany in the late 1790s. It was a fast and cheap method of mass-producing prints compared to the traditional practices of engraving and etching. Likewise, the art of the caricature, which was relatively established and popular in England (e.g. William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson), was just coming into vogue in France about this time. Lithography studios were emerging in Paris to fill demands for inexpensive illustrated papers and periodicals in a time of social and political upheaval. Daumier learned lithography from Charles Ramelet (1805–1851) and found work with Zéphirin Belliard (1798–1861), producing (often anonymously), miscellaneous illustrations, advertisements, street scenes, portraits, and caricatures in the mid to late 1820s, albeit honing his craft through the years.

Daumier's caricature of King Louis Philippe I, titled Gargantua, was published in December 1831. He was brought to court in February 1832 and charged with "inciting to hatred and contempt of the government and insulting the king"

After his release from prison on 14 February 1833, Daumier, who had been living with his parents up that time, moved into an artist phalanstery on Rue Saint-Denis, where his friends included Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Paul Huet, Philippe Auguste Jeanron, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Antoine-Augustin Préault. Although Daumier had been doing some painting for a number of years, it was in the late 1840s that he became increasingly dedicated to painting. Although associated with the realist movement, he did not identify himself as realist or advocate the ideology of realism in the way Gustave Courbet and others did. The art historian Maurice Raynal commented on his relationship with realism "this was not outcome of methods he deliberately chose or took from others. The truth is that realism was both a second nature with him and the consequence of the life he led, Actually, however, he never set up as an adept of realism, indeed it never occurred to him to apply the term to his art: still less to repudiate it" Jean Leymarie wrote "With the temperament of a Romantic and the approach of a Realist, Daumier belongs to the Barbizon generation, except that his domain was the human figure and not landscapes"

Daumier made several paintings of The Heavy Burden. The woman and her child look like they are being pushed by the wind, and Daumier used this as a metaphor of the greater forces they were actually fighting against. The woman and her child in the painting are outlined by a very dark shadow.

Prints and graphics

Daumier produced his social caricatures for Le Charivari, in which he held bourgeois society up to ridicule in the figure of Robert Macaire, hero of a popular melodrama. In another series, L'histoire ancienne, he took aim at the constraining pseudo-classicism of the art of the period. In 1848 Daumier embarked again on his political campaign, still in the service of Le Charivari, which he left in 1863 and rejoined in 1864.

Around the mid-1840s, Daumier started publishing his famous caricatures depicting members of the legal profession, known as 'Les Gens de Justice', a scathing satire about judges, defendants, attorneys and corrupt, greedy lawyers in general. A number of extremely rare albums appeared on white paper, covering 39 different legal themes, of which 37 had previously been published in the Charivari. It has been said that Daumier's own experience as an employee in a bailiff's office during his youth may have influenced his rather negative attitude towards the legal profession.

In 1834 he produced the lithograph Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834 depicting the massacre in the Rue Transnonain which was part of the April 1834 riots in Paris. It was designed for the subscription publication L'Association Mensuelle. The profits were to promote freedom of the press and defrayed legal costs of a lawsuit against the satirical, politically progressive journal Le Charivari to which Daumier contributed regularly. The police discovered the print hanging in the window of printseller Ernest Jean Aubert in the Galerie Véro-Dodat (passageway in 1st arrondissement) and subsequently tracked down and confiscated as many of the prints they could find, along with the original lithographic stone on which the image was drawn. Existing prints of Rue Transnonain are survivors of this effort.

Legacy Baudelaire noted of him: l'un des hommes les plus importants, je ne dirai pas seulement de la caricature, mais encore de l'art moderne. (One of the most important men, not only, I would say, in caricature, but also in modern art.) Vincent van Gogh was also a great admirer of his work. The first of many monographs on Daumier was published less than ten years after his death, by Arsène Alexander, Honoré Daumier, l'hommé et l'oeuvre, in 1888. An exhibition of his works was held at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1901. Daumier's works are found in many of the world's leading art museums, including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum. He is celebrated for a range of works, including a large number of paintings (500) and drawings (1000) some of them depicting the life of Don Quixote, a theme that fascinated him for the last part of his life.

A version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza was found as part of the 2012 Munich Art Hoard.

Daumier's 200th birthday was celebrated in 2008 with a number of exhibitions in Asia, America, Australia and Europe. There is a room-full of caricatures in the museum Am Römerholz in Winterthur.

The Daumier website lists all Daumier exhibitions starting from 1848 to present day. Daumier website

Complete catalogue The Daumier Register, an internet access to all known oil paintings, drawings, lithographs, woodcuts and sculptures by Daumier, with in-depth research results, provenance information, exhibitions, publications and numerous search functions, was launched in June 2004.

Exhibitions A list of almost 1,500 Daumier Exhibitions starting as early as 1849 until present time in the Daumier Website: Daumier exhibits and conferences

Galleries Prints and graphics

Sculpture

Drawings and watercolors

Paintings 1842‒1879 (Daumier rarely dated his paintings and experts frequently disagree on establishing dates)