Honoré Daumier was born in the Southern French port of Marseille in 1808. But when he was 8 years
old the family relocated to Paris, where his father, who had worked as a glazier,
hoped to start a new life as a poet and playwright. But unfortunately he fell
short of his ambitions and failed to achieve any success in either creative occupation
The young Daumier left school at the age of 12 to work as an errand boy but
also showed immense natural talent for drawing. When he expressed his artistic
ambitions to his parents they were far from pleased, but they grudgingly allowed
him to study for a while with the now forgotten painter Alexandre Lenoir.
In 1829 at the age of 21 he took a job with a print firm and this was where he first
encountered lithographic printing. Use of this reproduction process had become increasingly
widespread due to its ability to produce tonal shading effects that simply weren't possible
with engraving. He also worked briefly and uncredited for the lithographer Zéphirin
Belliard, and also took a few commissions from La Silhouette, a short lived weekly satirical paper.
But in 1830 Charles Philipon began publishing the satirical magazine La Caricature and he invited
Daumier to join as a staff artist , alongside his similarly talented contemporary J. J.
Grandville. And both these illustrators quickly proved themselves invaluable to the magazine.
It was in that year that France experienced its second revolution, and the deeply unpopular
tyrannical King Charles the Tenth was forced to flee to England. His cousin Louis Philippe was
subsequently crowned but to the consternation of many he turned out to be just as authoritarian.
Daumier's scathing satire of King Louis Philippe, titled Gargantua,
was published in late 1831 and such was its impact he was charged with "inciting hatred
and contempt of the government, and insulting the king" . He was fined for his transgression and
given a six month suspended sentence. By this time Daumier's popularity was
such that he he was also creating many satirical lithographs to be sold as prints, some of which
were hand coloured and fetched higher prices. Whether Daumier himself did the colouring I've
been unable to find out, but it's more than likely he would have made use of assistants.
In 1832 Charles Philipon, who had also spent some time in jail and suffered
punitive fines for his mockery of the King, launched another magazine Le Charivari which
was lighter in its satirical touch and more inclined towards social humour,
and it wasn't surprising that Daumier featured frequently in its pages.
Only a few months earlier Philipon had published his own image of the king
progressively becoming a pear and it soon caught on as a popular meme of the time.
Daumier and others quickly adapted this idea in their own work, and they appeared regularly
in La Caricature to the amusement of the citizens and annoyance of the authorities. Not only did
these images mock th King's physical appearance but in French un poire is also slang for a fool.
At this time he began creating a large series of sculptures, which were three dimensional
caricatures of prominent Parisians. They were modelled in clay and also painted in
colour. Some of these busts were reproduced in plaster, and bronze sculptures were
posthumously produced from the plaster casts. Whether they had much in the way of commercial
success isn't recorded but peripheral evidence seems to suggest they weren't wildly popular.
Despite his recent encounter with the law Daumier defiantly continued
to produce his antagonistic satires of the King and his minions in La Caricature. And
with a certain inevitability his cartoon The Court of King Pétaud,
which I could only find in its hand-coloured version and which didn't even show the King,
led to another arrest and a six month sentence in the far from salubrious Sainte-Pélagie prison.
After his release in 1833, Daumier moved into an artist's colony on Rue Saint-Denis
and once more resumed work for Charles Philipon. For a while at least both magazines and those who
worked for them managed to just about steer clear of the wrath of the authorities by cloaking their
harsher satires in more oblique visual metaphors But following a failed attempt to assassinate the
king in 1835 even more draconian laws were passed imposing much higher fines and longer prison
sentences for any criticism of the King. At this time, and perhaps justifiably
fearing for the loss of his freedom, Daumier's lithographs began to change,
turning away from direct political affronts and attacks on the King, and among other
popular series he produced a collection titled French Types which made fun, sometimes harsh and
at other times more affectionate, of Parisian society from the top down to the very bottom.
This series evolved into another, known as the Robert Macaire series - based on a character
from an earlier dramatic production. Daumier created the drawings and Philipon wrote the text,
and it proved so successful that over 100 different satires were created in which the
Macaire character assumed any number of roles. and again some were sold as hand coloured prints
Although by far the majority of Daumier's work was created by drawing onto lithographic stones
there were also some more infrequent ventures into wood engraving, but like the majority of
illustrators of his time he relied on others to produce the actual engravings from his pen and
ink originals. Among his more successful engraved projects was 1841's Physiologie de la Portière,
written by James Rousseau, which featured some more than usually gestural vignettes throughout.
In 1843 La Caricature folded, but Le Charivari endured and by default became Daumier's only
meaningful source of income, in the absence of any conspicuous success as an artist. And he
continued to create more lighthearted societal humour and generally more benign caricatures
of specific prominent French figures. But he didn't partcularly restrain his
more vitriolic inclinations when it came to the legal profession, and his popular series Les Gens
de Justice targeted the judges and members of the legal profession with a collection
of suitably harsh comic condemnations. In 1846, a young woman named Alexandrine
Dassy gave birth to Daumier's illegitimate son, who was also christened Honoré. Not long after
he did the decent thing and she became Mrs. Daumier and they moved to the Ile Saint-Louis,
a small natural island in the river Seine. Although he was enjoying at least some
financial success for his illustration work it's also recorded that he struggled to hold
on to the money he was making. Presumably through poor domestic management he found
himself in debt on more than one occasion, and the bailiffs appeared at his door with
some frequency to take away his possessions. This left him with no alternative other than
to keep producing cartoon work in order to support his family.,
and from the mid 1840s onwards his humorous work was collected and published as a series of albums,
and the income generated by them helped keep the wolf from his door, even if they didn't do
anything to advance his prospects as an artist. Although Daumier had always worked as a painter
and sculptor alongside his commercial illustration his art continued to be met
with general indifference and he struggled to find any success with this aspect of his creativity.
Naturally enough this led to a certain resentment of his commercial work on his part as a
consequence, and It's somewhat ironic that after his death, when the admiration was no use to him
whatsoever he became considered by many to have been the first significant impressionist painter.
In 1848 revolution returned to Paris and following the violent upheavals and destruction a republic
was established. Louis Phillipe, just like his predecessor, was forced into exile in England
and the French monarchy was abolished forever. Daumier was still working for Le Charivari but
He was growing increasingly tired and weary of what to him seemed to be an endless routine of
producing new cartoons at a rate of sometimes as many as eight a week. But he continued to depend
on the income it generated for another decade. And however strongly he felt disillusioned with
the creative prison he now found himself in certainly didn't show in the work he
created. His various series of drawings which were published at this time ere surprisingly
lighthearted in their humour and he increasingly turned to more generic cartoon styling and use
of the device of large headed characters of more whimsical appeal than previously.
He suffered a serious but unspecified illness in 1858 and by 1860 even his humorous illustration
was declining in popularity, and in that year Le Charivari terminated his employment with them.
And although in letting him go they had granted him his wish to work only as
an artist the next few years were a time of significant financial hardship and struggle,
as few showed any interest in his paintings. And by 1863 Daumier was selling his furniture
to be able to make ends meet. He and his family left the
Ile-Saint-Louis and moved to a succession of lodgings and apartments in Montmartre,
and he became increasingly depressed and introspective, rarely venturing out. But Le
Charivari actually came to his rescue and gave him a new contract to work for them in 1864.
Even so In 1865 Daumier left Montmartre permanently and rented a small cottage
in rural Valmondois, north of the city. Although as an artist he had touched on
the theme more than a decade earlier it was at this time he started working on a series
of paintings about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but just like his other paintings
they failed to set the art world on fire. Consequently his income was now virtually
nonexistent, but in a remarkable display of generosity his friend
the artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot bought the house Daumier had
been renting and gave it to him as a gift. Tragically it was also around this time that
he first realised his eyesight was starting to fail, and it got progressively worse in
the subsequent years, although he just about managed to keep working up to 1872.
in 1878 a group of his influential friends arranged a large exhibition of
his paintings at in Paris but although some paintings were sold It was nothing like the
financial success his friends or Daumier had hoped for. But rather ironically the work was
enthusiastically received by the critics, who now revised their previously low opinion of his art.
Sadly this new found admiration came just in time for him to die in poverty in 1879 at 71 years old.
In his lifetime Daumier had been remarkably prolific and versatile, and it's estimated
he created somewhere in the region of 100 sculptures, 500 paintings, 1000 drawings,
1000 wood engravings, and 4000 lithographs. And while it's certainly regrettable that he
never achieved the success he had hoped for as an artist, and that this was the cause
of considerable bitterness on his part, the lithographed satires he created over a career
lasting half a century remain some of the most visually engrossing and historically
revealing ever created. And although it came too late to be any use to the man
his paintings are also now considered to be a worthy contribution to 19th century French Art.
And I'm sure the terrible irony of this wouldn't have been wasted on Daumier himself.