Works by Honoré Daumier
409 works · 131 ms
Honoré Daumier earned his living with thousands of lithographs for the Paris satirical papers, mocking the king, the courts and the bourgeoisie, while his paintings went largely ignored.
A glazier's son from Marseille, he was working by about twelve, as an errand boy for a bailiff and then in a bookshop at the Palais-Royal, where he started to draw. Some think his time with the bailiff shaped his harsh view of lawyers in Les Gens de Justice. After the revolution of 1830 he drew for the opposition papers, and a caricature of King Louis Philippe as Gargantua earned him six months in Sainte-Pélagie prison from 1832.
Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834 shows a man in a nightshirt dead on the floor by his bed, a child's body beneath him; the police hunted down the prints and seized the stone. After the harsh press laws of 1835 he turned from the king to Paris manners: in a hooped skirt caught by the wind a woman sails up into the air while a man hauls at her hem. Nadar Elevating Photography to Art puts the photographer in a balloon basket, camera to his eye and top hat flying, over rooftops lettered Photographie.
From the late 1840s he gave more and more time to painting. The Laundress climbs from the river with her bundle and her small child, dark against the bright houses on the far bank. Corot and other painters often preferred such paintings to his prints, but the public ignored them until an exhibition in 1878, months before his death. Nearly all the works below are prints.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Portrait: Nadar.
