Honoré Daumier

19th century lithograph caricature black and white satirical figurative print

1860

This halftone print was included in the 1898 report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Smithsonain Institution. The sap buckets and yoke are from the Menomin...

"Une Application Utile Du Diamant Magnetiseur-Actualites" is an original lithograph, the second state of three, by Honore Daumier. It depicts a husband and wife pair. Artwork Size: 8 1/2" x 10 3/4" Frame Size: 17 3/4" x 20 1/4" Artist Bio: Daumier was a prolific draftsman who produced over 4000 lithographs, he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behavior of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognized. His works offer a commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century. French caricaturist and painter, born at Marseilles. He showed in his earliest youth an irresistible inclination towards the artistic profession, which his father vainly tried to check by placing him first with a huissier, and subsequently with a bookseller. Having mastered the technique of lithography, Daumier started his artistic career by producing plates for music publishers, and illustrations for advertisements; these were followed by anonymous work for publishers, in which he followed the style of Charlet and displayed considerable enthusiasm for the Napoleonic legend. When, in the reign of Louis-Philippe, Philipon launched the comic journal, La Caricature, Daumier joined its staff, which included such powerful artists as Devéria, Raffet and Grandville, 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 pseudoclassicism which held the art of the period in fetters. In 1848 Daumier embarked again on his political campaign, still in the service of Charivari, which he left in 1860 and rejoined in 1864. In spite of his prodigious activity in the field of caricature -- the list of Daumier's lithographed plates compiled in 1904 numbers no fewer than 3958 -- he found time for flight in the higher sphere of painting. Except for the searching truthfulness of his vision and the powerful directness of his brushwork, it would be difficult to recognize the creator of Robert Macaire, of Les Bas bleus, Les Bohémiens de Paris, and the Masques, in the paintings of "Christ and His Apostles" at the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam, or in his "Good Samaritan", "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza", "Christ Mocked...

'Jumbo' Vanity Fair legal portrait of Mr Samuel Pope QC, an Irish barrister. Accompanied by original descriptive text. 380mm by 260mm (sheet)

Vanity Fair legal portrait of Justice Gainsford Bruce. Sir Leslie Matthew Ward was a British portrait artist and caricaturist who over four decades painted 1,325 portraits which wer...