Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), French painter and caricaturist, whose bold, dramatic paintings were largely devoted to everyday themes and contained a strong note of social protest.

Daumier was born in Marseille and as a boy moved to Paris with his family. He worked in a law court and a bookshop and then studied art with a painter, at the Académie Suisse, and on his own. He began his career by making drawings for advertisements. He became a staff member of the comic journal, La Caricature, and became known for his bold, satirical political lithographs. One of these caricatures, published in 1832, showed the king, Louis Philippe, as Gargantua (the legendary giant who figures in the writings of François Rabelais) and resulted in Daumier's imprisonment for six months. He later satirized bourgeois society in a series of lithographs published in the journal Le Charivari and returned to satirizing political subjects during the Revolution of 1848. His sculptures in plaster and bronze, used as models for his drawings of people, are much sought after by collectors and galleries.

Daumier was a skilful draughtsman and extremely prolific, producing about 4,000 lithographs during his career, as well as 300 drawings and 200 paintings. They include Republic and The Thieves and the Ass (Louvre, Paris) and The Uprising (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). Daumier had a great number of imitators, but none of them attained the depth of his penetrating style.