Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier (born February 20/26, 1808, Marseille, France—died February 11, 1879, Valmondois, France) was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly known during his lifetime, helped introduce techniques of Impressionism into modern art.

Background and early life

Traits of Daumier’s ancestry—a violent temperament, a generous and rather fanciful turn of mind, and an easily aroused capacity for pity—all form part of his character. His mother’s family was from a village in which samples of unique ancient sculptured reliefs—fierce primitive human heads—had been found. His grandfather and father both worked in Marseille as “glaziers”—that is to say, dealers in frames (or passe-partout pictures) and decorative tableaux that they painted themselves. His godfather was a painter. When Daumier was seven, his father abandoned his business in order to go to Paris and, like so many Provençals, seek his fortune as a poet. He was presented to the king, Louis XVIII, but his swift fall from favor—he was famous only for a fortnight—unbalanced him mentally. After apparently being confined for many years, he died in the Charenton asylum.

Daumier received a typical lower middle-class education, but he wanted to draw, and his studies did not interest him. His family therefore placed him with an old and fairly well-known artist, Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir, a student and friend of Jacques-Louis David, a leading classicist painter, was more an aesthetician than a painter. He had a pronounced taste for Peter Paul Rubens, one of whose works he kept in his collection. A connoisseur of sculpture, he had saved the most beautiful medieval and contemporary sculptures from the Revolutionaries, which inspired a lasting interest in Daumier.

Daumier was then not at all the uncultured, self-taught genius that most art historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries depicted. He did not rise from an artistic void—he was the child of artists, however modest and unsuccessful they had been in making a name. Added to the advantage of this ancestry, he also benefitted from a more interesting artistic education than his contemporaries.

At the age of 13 his father’s breakdown forced Daumier to seek paying work. He first became a messenger boy for a bailiff and, from this experience, acquired his familiarity with the world of the lawcourts. He worked next as a bookseller’s clerk at the Palais-Royal. The Palais-Royal, with its arcades surrounding the garden, was one of the busiest spots in Paris, and there Daumier saw, parading before his employer’s window, all the characters of the Comédie humaine, about whom he would later talk with his friend Honoré de Balzac: not only men and women of fashion, intellectuals, and artists but also “captains of industry,” or swindlers, as they were commonly called—all of whom lent themselves to caricature.

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Artists, Painters, & Architects

Daumier’s development was thus complete at that moment when, about 1825–28, he decided to give up everything to embark on the artistic career of which he had dreamed so long. He was a young man of about 18 or 20, from a family of painters, who had had an opportunity to admire Rubens, had learned to analyze sculpture, and had been able to observe the appearance and behavior of different classes of society.

Physically he was ugly, at least according to the taste of his time. Heavyset like Balzac, although probably smaller, he had small but lively eyes and a large nose. He always kept a pipe in his mouth, in order to mask his Provençal accent and the frequent lisp of his native region.

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Daumier could not, of course, live from painting or from sculpture as he had set out to do. He therefore accepted commissions for lithographs—portraits and, at a very early age, cartoons of morals and manners (caricatures de moeurs), the first of these dating from 1822, when he was scarcely 15 years old and was just beginning to produce lithographs. Although some of his first works were signed, many others were not: they were portraits of celebrities that were signed by another native of Marseille, Zéphirin Belliard, Daumier’s elder by 10 years and the author of a lavish Iconographie des contemporains. For the most part these portraits were mediocre, modeled on another artist’s style, but they constituted an excellent apprenticeship for someone interested in the human physiognomy.

His life, devoted entirely to his work, was to be divided into two parts: from 1830 to 1847 he was a lithographer, cartoonist, and sculptor; and, beginning in 1848 and lasting until 1871, he was an Impressionist painter whose art was reflected in the lithographs he continued to produce. Constant work was not a burden to him; while producing 4,000 lithographs and 4,000 illustrative drawings, he sang sentimental songs whose foolishness made him laugh, and, “unconcerned with his works, he was always out drinking cheap wine with barge captains.”

Satirical lithographs

In 1830 Daumier began his satirical work: his busts lampooning certain contemporary types and his many lithographs. He enjoyed the company of grandiloquent men and mainly associated with men of the left. It was at this time that Charles Philipon, a liberal journalist who had founded the opposition journal La Caricature, invited him to become a contributor.

King Louis-Philippe generally tolerated jokes at his expense, but, when unduly provoked, rather than bring suit against a paper, he preferred to seize it, a procedure that meant ruin for its staff and financial backers. Only once during his reign did he deal severely with an offender—with Daumier in 1832, and then only after the second of the artist’s most violent attacks. Sentenced to six months in prison, Daumier spent two of them in the state prison and four in a mental hospital, the king apparently wanting to show that one had to be mad to oppose and caricature him.

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After his release in February 1833, Daumier was never again indicted, even though in his cartoons he continued to attack a regime, a form of society, and a concept of life that he scorned, while at the same time creating unforgettable characters. Daumier’s types were universal: businessmen, lawyers, doctors, professors, and petits bourgeois. His treatment of his lithographs was sculptural, leading Balzac to say about him that he had a bit of Michelangelo under his skin.

Daumier’s sculptures have still not been sufficiently studied. The 15 or so small busts that he modeled in clay for the window of the satirical journal for which he worked and that remained there some 30 years occupy an important place in the history of sculpture. Scarcely differing from official busts, but with the accentuation of a detail that made them caricatures, they constitute an unforgettable gallery of the politicians of the July monarchy. The complete series has not been preserved: it included a Louis-Philippe, which Daumier hid, and other pieces that were broken in moving. A few copies of the busts were cast in bronze in the 20th century, and their originality is the more striking when they are compared with similar pieces of that period.

Daumier’s only close friends were sculptors, all of them romantic, poor, and ardent left-wingers. Although intimate with these few friends, Daumier did not form part of any of the many artistic or literary coteries of the time. He was not inclined to frequent salons, or even saloons. When he went to a café, it was with his neighbors on the Île Saint-Louis, where he lived between 1833 and approximately 1850 in a studio on the quay d’Anjou. This old studio still exists, at the top of a house overlooking a world of roofs and open windows, behind which his models lived. Nor did his wife, to whom he was very attached, his dear “Didine” (Léopoldine), mix in artistic circles; she was a dressmaker.

In 1848 Daumier believed the era of social justice for which he had militantly fought for 20 years had arrived, and he took part in the official competition for the representation of the republic that was to replace the portrait of the king in all the municipal buildings of France. His rough sketch was beautiful, and, had he agreed to complete the painting, he would have received the prize.