Honoré Daumier: Head and Shoulders Above Other Caricaturists

Honoré Daumier - Jean-Auguste Chevandier de Valdrome, Parliamentarian (The Fool) - 1832-35 - Oil-glazed clay, height 19 cm - Musée d'Orsay, ParisFrench caricaturist, painter, and sculptor Honoré Daumier was known chiefly as a political and social satirist, during his lifetime. But since his death, recognition of his qualities as a painter has grown.

In 1830, after learning the still fairly new process of lithography, he began to contribute political cartoons to the antigovernment weekly, “Caricature”. He was an ardent Republican and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1832 for his attacks on Louis-Philippe, whom he represented as 'Gargantua swallowing bags of gold extorted from the people'.

Honoré Daumier - The Uprising - c. 1860 - Oil on canvas, 87.6 x 113 cm (34 1/2 x 44 1/2 in); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)

On the suppression of political satire in 1835 he again turned to the satire of social life. At the time of the 1848 revolution, he returned to political subjects.

He is said to have made more  than 4,000 lithographs, wishing each time that the one he had just made could be his last. In the last years of his life he was almost blind and was saved from destitution by the artist Camille Corot.

In the directness of his vision and the lack of sentimentality with which he depicts current social life, Daumier belongs to the Realist school of which Gustav Courbet was the chief representative. As a caricaturist, he stands head and shoulders above all others of the 19th century. He had the gift of expressing the whole character of a person through physiognomy, and the essence of his satire lay in his power to interpret mental folly in terms of physical absurdity. In this respect, his work is accurately placed within the realm of Symbolism. Although he never made a commercial success of his art, he was appreciated by discriminating individuals. Delacroix, Corot, Forain, and Baudelaire were among his friends. Degas was one of a number of artists who collected his works.