Honoré Daumier
The draughtsman of satire.
Daumier made thousands of lithographs for newspapers, mocking politicians and lawyers. He was jailed for a caricature of the king.
Honoré Daumier was born in Marseille in 1808. His father was a glazier who wrote poetry, and the family moved to Paris when Honoré was small in the hope that his father would make his name as a poet. He did not, and the family was poor. Honoré had to work from an early age, including as an errand boy for a bailiff and as an assistant in a bookshop. He learned lithography, a new technique for printing images cheaply.
He began drawing for satirical papers, especially Charles Philipon's La Caricature. In 1831 he portrayed King Louis-Philippe as the giant Gargantua swallowing the people's money. He was sentenced to six months in prison. The lithograph Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834 shows a family killed by soldiers during a riot. It is one of the earliest and most powerful images of state violence.
For the rest of his life Daumier drew for the newspaper Le Charivari, producing some four thousand lithographs in all. He mocked politicians, lawyers, judges, the bourgeoisie and the art public. He also made small clay busts of members of parliament, caricatures in three dimensions that are now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Less well known in his lifetime was that he also painted. His paintings show laundresses, third-class railway passengers and Don Quixote, done with strong contours and a powerful light. The Laundress is in the Musée d'Orsay and The Third-Class Carriage in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In old age he became almost blind and poor. His friend Corot arranged for him to live in a house at Valmondois outside Paris.
Daumier died in 1879. He had his first major exhibition only the year before. The poet Charles Baudelaire and many artists admired him. He is regarded as one of the greatest caricaturists in history and as a forerunner of Realism and of modern photojournalism.