Daumier: chronicler and satirist of 19th-century Paris

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Admired by his contemporary artists but ignored by critics and public, Daumier is at last appreciated. Alette Rye Scales reports from London’s Royal Academy

The first British exhibition of Honoré Daumier’s work in 50 years is currently showing in London.  Admired in his lifetime by artists and writers, notably Baudelaire, who thought him one of the most important men ‘in the whole of modern art’, Daumier (1808–79) deserves more recognition in this country, according to the curators of ‘Visions of Paris’.  

The exhibition, which comprises 130 lithographs, watercolours, drawings, paintings and sculptural works, is the first Daumier exhibition in the UK since an Arts Council exhibition at the Tate in 1961.   Chronologically hung in the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing Galleries, the show is divided into six thematic sections. Here we see Daumier’s journey from newspaper caricaturist to observer and visual chronicler of 19th-century Paris and finally, painter of intimate and contemplative scenes.  In all his works, however, people – and in most cases, the people of Paris – are his true subjects.   From his earliest effort at history painting, a Rubenesque effort entitled The Miller, his Son and the Ass from 1849, which hangs in the first room of the show, it soon became obvious that Daumier’s talent lay elsewhere.

When he arrived in Paris from his native Marseille, Daumier had settled on the Quai d’Anjou in the then working-class – and bohemian – area of Ile St Louis, which provided him with plenty of subject matter for his art, painted from memory back in his studio.  Beautifully realized paintings and chalk drawings of laundresses, bargemen, street entertainers and others living on the margins of society reveal his great skill as a draughtsman and his great empathy with his subjects.   He had made good use of this talent, turning to the new medium of lithography, which enabled him to earn a living when he started his career in 1830.  

Against the background of intense political turmoil and changes of 19th-century France, Daumier soon made a name for himself through his daring and uncompromising newspaper caricatures of the political establishment.  At various times, the censorship laws were tightened and the infamous caricature of King Louis-Philippe, the 1831 Gargantua (cat.5), which shows the king sitting on a large chair ingesting a seemingly endless supply of money hauled up by the masses, while defaecating honours on his favoured politicians below, earned the artist six months in prison.  

But Daumier remained a staunch republican who felt great empathy with the lowest in society and an equal amount of contempt for the establishment.  Clerics, judges and government ministers are caricatured, not just on paper, but also in sculptural forms such as the series of mini busts, replicas of some of which are on show here.  Daumier also satirized the pretensions of the rising  bourgeoisie.   A Zealous Student Practising at Home (from the ‘Les baigneuses’ series of 1847) (cat.56), which depicts a young woman balancing precariously on a pouffe while practising breaststroke, is an hilarious example of the latter category. 

The declared aim of the exhibition, however, is to give equal weight to Daumier’s paintings, and amongst the satirical lithographs are a number of these.  One rather mysterious painting is the biblical Ecce Homo (c.1849–52) (cat. 26), in which a blurred and dark image of Christ in the dock is seen against the light – a technique that renders the image very Rembrandtesque  – with roughly outlined figures behind and in front of the dock, including a man pointing a finger at Christ, leaving no doubt as to the meaning of the image.  It is a strange painting, unique in Daumier’s oeuvre (he was not religious), but as an allegory of human suffering and injustice it is a powerful image.  The same empathy with the suffering is evident in several sketches entitled ‘Fugitives’, showing the plight of people trying to escape disease, poverty or war. 

Other intriguing paintings on show include several of the fictitious Don Quixote with and without Sancho Panza, which are strangely beguiling in their mystery.   Following on from this is a section that stresses Daumier’s position at the centre of an artistic milieu in in Paris, such as the marvellous small paintings of tiny galleries with customers leafing through prints or connoisseurs admiring works as well as artists looking at their own work.  All can be seen to involve a particular kind of contemplative looking, something the curators want us to notice also in the artist’s most famous painting, The Third-class Railway Carriage (1862–4) (cat. 89).  This large painting depicts a crowded carriage with rows of working-class people, fronted by two women, one of whom is looking down in contentment at her suckling child, whilst the other looks at nothing in particular with a contemplative smile on her face, hands folded across the basket on her lap.

Toward the end of his life, Daumier’s eyesight was waning and he spent most of his time in his house in Valmondois just outside Paris, where inevitably his gaze turned inward and his painting became loser and more fluid.  The painting entitled Lunch in the Country (c.1868) (cat.85) stands out in this last section.  It is an exquisite image of an everyday gathering of three men and a dog at the end of lunch seated round a table in a garden.  Painted with lose brushstrokes in muted colours, the figures outlined in black against the light, the picture appears bright and modern, looking forward to the technique and subject matter of Impressionism.  It exudes an atmosphere of tranquillity that contrasts strongly with the many earlier pictures of the poor and downtrodden of Paris whom Daumier had spent years depicting with a biting honesty but also affection and empathy.

Although the breadth and variety of the exhibited works is almost overwhelming in this small exhibition space, ‘Visions of Paris’ reveals the genius of an artist whose reputation rests on the newspaper caricatures and satirical lithographs he made to earn a living, but whose oeuvre include profoundly moving paintings and sketches of the people the artist observed around him, carried out in a technique and manner that owes debts to Rembrandt and Goya, whilst also looking forward to Impressionism.  The exhibition is an overdue effort to present a comprehensive picture of this artist who was clearly more than a satirist and lithographer.