Honoré Victorin Daumier was a French painter, printmaker, caricaturist, and sculptor. A romantic realist in style, he produced caricatures that are abiding commentaries on politics and social manners.
Background
Honoré Daumier was born on February 26, 1808, in Marseilles, France, the son of Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier, a glazier, and Cécile Catherine Philippe. When Honoré was 6, the family moved to Paris, where the elder Daumier hoped to win success as a poet. He grew up in a home in which humanistic concerns had some importance.
Education
Daumier received a typical lower middle-class education, but he wanted to draw, and his studies did not interest him. 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.
Career
Having mastered the technique of lithography while working for a lithographer and publisher named Belliard, Daumier started his artistic career by producing plates for music publishers, and illustrations for advertisements. When, in the reign of Louis Philippe, Philipon launched the comic journal, La Caricature, Daumier joined its staff, and started upon his pictorial campaign of scathing satire upon 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 Pélagie in 1832.
The publication of La Caricature was discontinued soon after, but Philipon provided a new field for Daumier’s activity when he founded the Charivari. For this journal Daumier produced his famous social caricatures, in which bourgeois society is held up to ridicule in the figure of Robert Macaire, the hero of a then popular melodrama. Another series, “L’histoire ancienne,” was directed against the pseudo-classicism which held the art of the period in fetters.
The Revolution of 1848 gave Daumier another opportunity to do political cartoons, among them The Last Meeting of the Council and Victor Hugo and Émile Girardin. At this time he also began his serious work as a painter with a competition picture, heroic in conception, The Republic; an unfinished We Want Barabbas; and a revolutionary street scene, The Uprising, whose authenticity some scholars question. In 1850, as Louis Napoleon seemed to be an increasing threat to the republic, Daumier fashioned a sculptured caricature, Ratapoil ("Ratskin"), which symbolized the whole class of Bonapartist followers and Napoleon himself. It is a strikingly novel pictorial conception of sculpture and seems almost to have been "painted" with some fluid material. A decade later The Laundress (ca. 1863) reflects Daumier's deep interest in ordinary people and, in subject at least, belongs to the mid-century development of realism. The Drama (ca. 1860) is one of the few paintings directly related to a lithograph.
In the early 1860s, when Daumier had no regular employment, he did many small canvases, watercolors, and drawings. His persistent interest in the arts comes out delightfully in a little watercolor picture, The Connoisseurs, in which his skill in expressing human responses by silhouettes and physical attitudes is perfectly realized. In the late 1860s Daumier gave a great deal of attention to the European scene, especially to the development of Prussia as a military threat. The menace of militarism is summed up in European Equilibrium (1867) and the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War in Peace-an Idyl (1871). The late lithographs are conceived in a new, open, and sketchily linear style.
As a painter, Daumier, one of the pioneers of naturalism, was before his time, and did not meet with success until in 1878, a year before his death, when M. Durand-Ruel collected his works for exhibition at his galleries and demonstrated the full range of the genius of the man who has been well called the Michelangelo of caricature. At the time of this exhibition Daumier, totally blind, was living in a cottage at Valmondois, where he died on February 10, 1879.