Daumier, Honoré

Dau·mier (dō-myāʹ), Honoré. 1808-1879.

French artist best known for his bitterly satirical lithographs of scenes from bourgeois society.

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▪ French artist

Introduction

in full  Honoré-Victorin Daumier 

born Feb. 20/26, 1808, Marseille

died Feb. 11, 1879, Valmondois, France

  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 favour—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 middleclass 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 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 have 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 Balzac (Balzac, Honoré de): 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.

      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 behaviour 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.

      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, modelled 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.

      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 modelled 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 neighbours 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.

Impressionist (Impressionism) techniques

      He did not do so, however, for he had become preoccupied with new technical studies; earlier than others, he had discovered Impressionism—faces and bodies devoured by the surrounding light and becoming one with the atmosphere. He painted a great deal, and the more so as his studies in the new technique did not interest the satirical journals to which he now submitted drawings devoid of humorous meaning. He was supported by Charles Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Charles) and by that poet's friends. The two men had met in 1845 and saw each other more frequently after 1848. Baudelaire, who “adored him,” wrote in 1857 the only significant article on Daumier to appear in the painter's lifetime.

      Daumier was indeed the first of the Impressionists. As early as 1848, his lithographs show contours effaced by light. Two factors, however, prevented this fact from being noticed: the lack of interest in his lithographs shown by historians of painting and the lack of research to establish the exact dates of the lithographs. These dates were not necessarily those of their appearance. It has been shown, for instance, that the Impressionist lithographs, which appeared around 1860, had been rejected by journals in 1848 as being too bold, too modern. Because of this lack of demand, Daumier's Impressionist lithographs are not very numerous, but his painting shows that he was won over to Impressionism. The paintings, also, were too few in number to assign him his true place in the history of Impressionism—before Manet and Monet, both of whom admired him greatly.

      The dating of Daumier's paintings has given rise to controversy. Nineteenth-century art historians and those prior to 1938 dated them largely in relation to the paintings of his contemporaries. But it now seems more reasonable to date them from his lithographs, for it is not likely for an artist who changes styles frequently to work differently when drawing on a lithographic stone than when painting on canvas. When Daumier imagined a form, he would fashion and refashion it numerous times in his lithography. It is not likely that he would wait four to six years after he had stopped dealing with it in his lithographs to treat it in his painting. The question may be studied again, but not on the basis of documents of the period, for Daumier's notebooks were too abbreviated, and critiques by his contemporaries were rare, since he seldom showed his works, and they went largely unnoticed.

 Daumier's paintings are highly original, both in their style and in the subjects they present. He created the painting of morals and manners (la peinture de moeurs) featuring in his work the everyday life on the Île Saint-Louis and its quays, such as children playing in the water, one of them brought back to its parents after an accident; horses leaving a water trough; washerwomen wearily returning up the stairs from the river or fighting against the wind, their bundles in their arms; drinkers in a pub; and masons on a scaffold. He was stirred by the theatre, then by railroads, which he used as a means of showing galleries of faces as powerful in their impact as those of the Ventre législatif (“Legislative Belly” or “Vile Body of the Legislature”). Earlier, the Palais de Justice had provided him with the opportunity of drawing his dramatically impressive lawyers (see photograph—>). Then he went to Valmondois, on the outskirts of Paris, and depicted rustic scenes. Much of his painting was devoted to artists' studios—not studios of a studied picturesqueness but those where artists were concerned with creating works of art.

      These subjects are found again in his lithographs, together with topical subjects, such as seaside resorts, hunting, and winter scenes, all of which, having been commissioned, seemed to inspire him less. Thus he transposed into his painting what had until then belonged to the domain of the caricatures of morals and manners.

      Daumier was not often inspired by religious subjects, except for the image of Christ, insulted and ridiculed, in which there appears to be personal allusion—that of a man who each day hoped to draw his last cartoon so that he could devote himself to painting. On the other hand, mythology excited him during his Rubens period under Lenoir; but in this case, obviously, the subject was only a prop for the painting.

      On several occasions Daumier painted historical subjects. He painted Camille Desmoulins, the Revolutionary leader, rousing the crowd in 1789; and his Emigrants of 1857 is an allusion to the authoritarian empire of Napoleon III, a painting that echoes the words of the proscribed Victor Hugo: “It is not I who am proscribed, it is liberty; it is not I who am exiled, it is France.”

      The types that Daumier created did not always survive him. He created a Louis-Philippe, but above all Robert Macaire (the typical businessman of Louis-Philippe's reign). His Bons Bourgeois probably served as a reference for the French middle class up to the 1940s. In any case, his Lawyers remain up-to-date.

      Following tradition, Daumier took pupils who learned their craft by copying and imitating his works. Two of them are known by name: Boulard and Gill. Their works are known—incorrectly—as faux Daumier, for works are only false when one is unable to see that they are the exercises of pupils.

      Less solitary than he is said to have been, and admired by the new school, notably by Manet (Manet, Édouard), Daumier grew old: sadly, for he would have liked to give up his lithographic work in favour of painting, but he could not do so. But he was happy in the knowledge that his lithographs preserved their force, as Hugo said in 1870 when Daumier symbolized his great satirical poem Les Châtiments by a crucified eagle.

      In 1871, Daumier, who had discreetly refused to be decorated by the empire, became a member of the leftist Paris Commune. He was almost blind during his last years. His drawings, like those of Edgar Degas, gained a magnificent wholeness. He had one last joy, an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1878. People began to say that his paintings were at least as good as his lithographs, though it was more the republican than the artist that they wished to celebrate.

      As a cartoonist, Daumier enjoyed a wide reputation, although as a painter he remained unknown. His fame was not based, any more than it is today, on critical appreciations but, rather, on the smiling or laughing admiration of those who read the satirical journals.

Jean Adhémar

Additional Reading

Twentieth-century works that are particularly recommended include Jean Adhemar, Drawings and Watercolors (1954); Oliver W. Larkin, Daumier, Man of His Time (1966); K.E. Maison, Honoré Daumier: Catalogue raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolours, and Drawings, 2 vol. (1968); Howard P. Vincent, Daumier and His World (1968); Jeanne L. Wasserman, Daumier Sculpture: A Critical and Comparative Study (1969), a very good study and catalog of an exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum; and Roger Passeron, Daumier (1981), a general introduction.

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