Honoré Daumier
Encyclopedia
Honoré Daumier was a French
printmaker, caricaturist, painter
, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.
A prolific draftsman who produced over 500 paintings, 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings, 100 sculptures he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behavior of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognized.
to Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier and Cécile Catherine Philippe. His father Jean-Baptiste was a glazier
whose literary aspirations led him to move to Paris in 1814, seeking to be published as a poet
. In 1816 the young Daumier and his mother followed Jean-Baptiste to Paris. Daumier showed in his youth an irresistible inclination towards the artistic profession, which his father vainly tried to check by placing him first with a huissier
, for whom he was employed as an errand boy, and later, with a bookseller. In 1822 he became protégé to Alexandre Lenoir
, a friend of Daumier's father who was an artist and archaeologist. The following year Daumier entered the Académie Suisse
. He also worked for a lithographer and publisher named Belliard, and made his first attempts at lithography.
Having mastered the techniques of lithography
, Daumier began his artistic career by producing plates for music
publishers, and illustrations for advertisements. This was followed by anonymous work for publishers, in which he emulated the style of Charlet
and displayed considerable enthusiasm for the Napoleonic legend. Daumier was almost blind by 1873.
During the reign of Louis Philippe
, Charles Philipon
launched the comic journal, La Caricature, Daumier joined its staff, which included such powerful artists as Devéria
, Raffet
and Grandville
, and started upon his pictorial campaign of satire, targeting the foibles of the bourgeoisie
, the corruption of the law and the incompetence of a blundering government
. His caricature of the king as Gargantua led to Daumier's imprisonment for six months at Ste Pelagie in 1832. Soon after, the publication of La Caricature was discontinued, but Philipon provided a new field for Daumier's activity when he founded the Le Charivari
.
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 1860 and rejoined in 1864.
Around the mid 1840's 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 is 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.
Eventually Daumier produced between 36 bust of French members of Parliament in unbaked clay. The foundries involved from 1927 on to produce a bronze edition were Barbedienne in an edition of 25 & 30 casts and Valsuani with three special casts based on the previous plaster from the Sagot-Le Garrec clay collection.These bronze bust are all posthumous, based on the original, but frequently restored unbaked clay sculptures. The clay in its restored version can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
From the early 1950s on some baked clay 'Figurines' appeared,most of them belonging to the Gobin collection in Paris. It was Gobin who decided to have a bronze cast done by Valsuani in an edition of 30 each. Again they were posthumous and there is no proof, in contrast to the busts mentioned above, that these terra cotta figurines really were done by Daumier himself. The American school (J.Wasserman from the Fogg-Harvard Museum) are doubting their authenticity, while the French school, especially Gobin, Lecomte and of course Le Garrec and Cherpin, all somehow involved in the marketing of the bronze editions are sure of their Daumier origin. The Daumier Register (the international center of Daumier research) as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC would consider the figurines as 'in the manner of Daumier' or even 'by an imitator of Daumier' (NGA)
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of Daumier's Ratapoil and his Emigrants. The self portrait in bronze as well as the amazing bust of Louis XIV were frequently discussed over the last 100 years, but the general tenor is to accept them as originals by Daumier.
in Amsterdam
), or in his Good Samaritan, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ Mocked, or even in the sketches in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington. There is a splendid room-full of caricatures in the gallery "Am Romerholz" at Wintertur.
As a painter, Daumier, one of the pioneers of realism, did not meet with success until a year before his death in 1878, when M. Durand-Ruel
collected his works for exhibition at his galleries and demonstrated the range of the talent of the man who has been called the "Michelangelo
of caricature". At the time of the exhibition, Daumier was blind and living in a cottage at Valmondois
, which Corot placed at his disposal. It was there that he died. He painted about 500 oil paintings.
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, I will not say only of caricature, but also of modern art.)
An exhibition of his works was held at the École des Beaux-Arts
in 1901.
Today, 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 Quijote, a theme that fascinated him for the last part of his life.
Daumier's 200th birthday was celebrated in 2008 with a number of exhibitions in Asia, America, Australia and Europe.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
printmaker, caricaturist, painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.
A prolific draftsman who produced over 500 paintings, 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings, 100 sculptures he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behavior of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognized.
Life
Daumier was born in MarseilleMarseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
to Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier and Cécile Catherine Philippe. His father Jean-Baptiste was a glazier
Glazier
A Glazier is a construction professional who selects, cuts, installs, replaces, and removes residential, commercial, and artistic glass. Glaziers also install aluminum storefront frames and entrances, glass handrails and balustrades, shower enclosures, curtain wall framing and glass and mirror...
whose literary aspirations led him to move to Paris in 1814, seeking to be published as a poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. In 1816 the young Daumier and his mother followed Jean-Baptiste to Paris. Daumier showed in his youth an irresistible inclination towards the artistic profession, which his father vainly tried to check by placing him first with a huissier
Huissier
The French word huissier comes from huis, that is, a house. The word huissier thus designates two professions that originally had to do with opening and closing doors....
, for whom he was employed as an errand boy, and later, with a bookseller. In 1822 he became protégé to Alexandre Lenoir
Alexandre Lenoir
Marie Alexandre Lenoir was a French archaeologist. Self-taught and devoted to saving France's historic monuments, sculptures and tombs from the ravages of the French Revolution, notably those of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Geneviève.- Life :The ravages of the Revolution caused the birth of the Musée...
, a friend of Daumier's father who was an artist and archaeologist. The following year Daumier entered the Académie Suisse
Académie Suisse
The Académie Suisse was an art school founded by Charles Suisse, and was located at the corner of the Quai des Orfévres and the Boulevard du Palais, in Paris...
. He also worked for a lithographer and publisher named Belliard, and made his first attempts at lithography.
Having mastered the techniques of lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
, Daumier began his artistic career by producing plates for music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
publishers, and illustrations for advertisements. This was followed by anonymous work for publishers, in which he emulated the style of Charlet
Nicolas Toussaint Charlet
Nicolas Toussaint Charlet , French designer and painter, more especially of military subjects, was born in Paris....
and displayed considerable enthusiasm for the Napoleonic legend. Daumier was almost blind by 1873.
Published works
Louis-Philippe of France
Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the July Monarchy. His father was a duke who supported the French Revolution but was nevertheless guillotined. Louis Philippe fled France as a young man and spent 21 years in exile, including considerable time in the...
, Charles Philipon
Charles Philipon
Charles Philipon . Born in Lyon, he was a French lithographer, caricaturist and journalist. He was the editor of the La Caricature and of Le Charivari, both satirical political journals....
launched the comic journal, La Caricature, Daumier joined its staff, which included such powerful artists as Devéria
Achille Devéria
Achille Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria was a French painter and lithographer. His father was a civil employee of the navy and student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson and Louis Lafitte ....
, Raffet
Denis Auguste Marie Raffet
Denis Auguste Marie Raffet was a French illustrator and lithographer. He was a student of Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, and was a retrospective painter of the Empire.-Biography:Raffet was born in Paris....
and Grandville
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard , generally known by the pseudonym of J. J. Grandville, was a French caricaturist.-Life and work:...
, and started upon his pictorial campaign of satire, targeting the foibles of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
, the corruption of the law and the incompetence of a blundering government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
. His caricature of the king as Gargantua led to Daumier's imprisonment for six months at Ste Pelagie in 1832. Soon after, the publication of La Caricature was discontinued, but Philipon provided a new field for Daumier's activity when he founded the Le Charivari
Le Charivari
Le Charivari was an illustrated newspaper published in Paris, France from 1832 to 1937. It published caricatures, political cartoons and reviews...
.
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
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
. 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 1860 and rejoined in 1864.
Around the mid 1840's 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 is 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.
Sculptures
Daumier was not only a prolific lithographer, draftsman and painter, but he also produced a notable number of sculptures in unbaked clay. In order to save these rare specimen from destruction, some of these busts were reproduced first in plaster. Bronze sculptures were posthumously produced from the plaster. The major 20th century foundries were Barbedienne, Rudier, Siot-Decauville and Valsuani.Eventually Daumier produced between 36 bust of French members of Parliament in unbaked clay. The foundries involved from 1927 on to produce a bronze edition were Barbedienne in an edition of 25 & 30 casts and Valsuani with three special casts based on the previous plaster from the Sagot-Le Garrec clay collection.These bronze bust are all posthumous, based on the original, but frequently restored unbaked clay sculptures. The clay in its restored version can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
From the early 1950s on some baked clay 'Figurines' appeared,most of them belonging to the Gobin collection in Paris. It was Gobin who decided to have a bronze cast done by Valsuani in an edition of 30 each. Again they were posthumous and there is no proof, in contrast to the busts mentioned above, that these terra cotta figurines really were done by Daumier himself. The American school (J.Wasserman from the Fogg-Harvard Museum) are doubting their authenticity, while the French school, especially Gobin, Lecomte and of course Le Garrec and Cherpin, all somehow involved in the marketing of the bronze editions are sure of their Daumier origin. The Daumier Register (the international center of Daumier research) as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC would consider the figurines as 'in the manner of Daumier' or even 'by an imitator of Daumier' (NGA)
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of Daumier's Ratapoil and his Emigrants. The self portrait in bronze as well as the amazing bust of Louis XIV were frequently discussed over the last 100 years, but the general tenor is to accept them as originals by Daumier.
Paintings
In addition to his prodigious activity in the field of caricature — the list of Daumier's lithographed plates compiled in 1904 numbers no fewer than 3,958 — he also painted. Except for the searching truthfulness of his vision and the powerful directness of his brushwork, it would be difficult to recognize the creator of Robert Macaire, of Les Bas bleus, Les Bohémiens de Paris, and the Masques, in the paintings of Christ and His Apostles (RijksmuseumRijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam or simply Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein. The museum is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art...
in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
), or in his Good Samaritan, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ Mocked, or even in the sketches in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington. There is a splendid room-full of caricatures in the gallery "Am Romerholz" at Wintertur.
As a painter, Daumier, one of the pioneers of realism, did not meet with success until a year before his death in 1878, when M. Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists. He was one of the first modern art dealers who provided support to his painters with stipends and solo exhibitions....
collected his works for exhibition at his galleries and demonstrated the range of the talent of the man who has been called the "Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
of caricature". At the time of the exhibition, Daumier was blind and living in a cottage at Valmondois
Valmondois
Valmondois is a commune in the Val-d'Oise department in Île-de-France in northern France.-Local attractions:*Musée des tramways à vapeur et des chemins de fer secondaires français* Musée de la Meunerie-References:** -External links:* * *...
, which Corot placed at his disposal. It was there that he died. He painted about 500 oil paintings.
Legacy
BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
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, I will not say only of caricature, but also of modern art.)
An exhibition of his works was held at the École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
in 1901.
Today, Daumier's works are found in many of the world's leading art museums, including the Louvre
Louvre
The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
and the Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam or simply Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein. The museum is dedicated to arts, crafts, and history. It has a large collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age and a substantial collection of Asian art...
. 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 Quijote, a theme that fascinated him for the last part of his life.
Daumier's 200th birthday was celebrated in 2008 with a number of exhibitions in Asia, America, Australia and Europe.
External links
- Daumier Website, complete website on Daumier's life and work; Bibliography, Exhibitions etc.
- Daumier's biography, style and critical reception
- Web Gallery of Art
- http://lts.brandeis.edu/research/archives-speccoll/daumier/world/index.htmlDaumier Lithographs and some information at Brandeis UniversityBrandeis UniversityBrandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
] - Prints at the Art Institute of Chicago
- Honoré Daumier (French, 1808 - 1879) on MutualArt.com
- Works at the Musée d'Orsay: paintings and especially good selection of sculptures
- Daumier on Youtube a not overly serious travel guide by Daumier
- Daumier on Poverty in Youtube a contribution by the Daumier Register
- Daumier on Sports in Youtube Sport is good for you.... oh, really? a contribution by the Daumier Register
- Daumier an unusual exhibition on Youtube A not so serious guide to an exhibition of 19th century French caricatures by Honoré Daumier, supplied by the Daumier-Register
- Daumier and Max Raabe, two lady-killers on youtube by the Daumier Register
- Daumier and Max Raabe, the little green cactus on Youtube by the Daumier Register.
- Website featuring a selection of Daumier videos by the Daumier Register and 500 photographs of Daumier lithographs