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Daumier's figures are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is carried almost to madness.
The biographer has told his story better perhaps in his careful catalogue of the artist's productions, the first sketch of which is to be found in L'Art for 1878. This copious list is Daumier's real history; his life cannot have been a very different business from his work.
There is a whole series of drawings descriptive of his exploits, a hundred masterly plates which, according to M. Champfleury, consecrated Daumier's reputation. The subject, the legend, was in most cases, still according to M. Champfleury, suggested by Philipon.
Baudelaire, whose critical flair never failed him, wrote in his Curiosités Esthétiques: "Daumier's distinguishing note as an artist is his certainty. His drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous improvisation.
The Societe des Gens de Lettres desires that, the first having been named by me the "Chateaudun" and the second "Les Chatiments", the third shall be called the "Victor Hugo." I have consented. Pierre Veron has sent me Daumier's fine drawing representing the Empire annihilated by Les Chatiments. November 16. Baroche, they say, has died at Caen.
Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded several journals, actually claimed a share in Daumier's success because he wrote some of the silly dialogues to his plates.
It puts method and power and the strange, real, mingled air of things into Daumier's black sketchiness, so full of the technical gras, the "fat" which French critics commend and which we have no word to express. It puts power above all, and the effect which he best achieves, that of a certain simplification of the attitude or the gesture to an almost symbolic generality.
He was the painter of the Parisian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeois was in the air. M. Champfleury has given a summary of Daumier's career in his smart little Histoire e la Caricature Moderne, a record not at all abundant in personal detail.
is the Salle Française du Second Empire and contains Horace Vernet's well known, The Barrière de Clichy, Defence of Paris in 1814; and Ary Scheffer's, Death of Géricault. 2938 is the great caricaturist Daumier's portrait of Théodore Rousseau.
He subsequently established the Charivari and launched a publication entitled L'Association Lithographique Mensuelle, which brought to light much of Daumier's early work. The artist passed rapidly from seeking his way to finding it, and from an ineffectual to a vigorous form.
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