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Updated: June 22, 2025
We hasten to add that its satiric force varies immensely in kind and in degree according to the race, or to the individual talent, that takes advantage of it. I used just now the term pessimism; but that was doubtless in a great measure because I have been turning over a collection of the extraordinarily vivid drawings of Honoré Daumier.
The whole thing is symbolic and full of grim-ness, imagination and pity. It is the sense that we shall find in him, mixed with his homelier extravagances, an element prolific in indications of this order that draws us back to Daumier. The play was not over when the curtain fell, four months ago; it was continued in a supplementary act or epilogue which took place immediately afterwards.
M. Eugène Montrosier, in a highly appreciative article on Daumier in L'Art for 1878, says that this same Philipon was le journalisme fait homme; which did not prevent him rather in fact fostered such a result from being perpetually in delicate relations with the government. He had had many horses killed under him, and had led a life of attacks, penalties, suppressions and resurrections.
This small personage, however, was able to perceive later, when he was unfortunately deprived of the chance of studying them, that there were various things in them besides the power to excite a vague alarm. Daumier was perhaps a great artist; at all events unsatisfied curiosity increased in proportion to that possibility.
Charles Jacque, with the keen smile and the facility for absorbing ideas from the best of them; Ziem even, who painted Venice for some years in the shades of Fontainebleau; Dupré, whose nature expresses itself in deep sunsets gleaming through the oaks of the forest; Daubigny, the youngest of the group, and the more immediate forerunner of landscape as it is to-day, then winning his first success; Decamps, who later sometimes left the Imperial Court, domiciled for the moment at the palace of Fontainebleau, and brought his personality of a great painter who failed through lack of elementary instruction, among them; Daumier, the great caricaturist, and possibly greater painter, but for the engrossing character of the work which first fell in his way all these and more made up the constantly shifting group.
Daumier, who passed in general for a contributor to illustrated journals, even such journals as Le Petit Journal pour Rire, was not only a genius of the first rank, but a painter of the first class. Monvel and Monténard at present are masterly painters. But in their illustration as well as in their painting, they show a notable change from the illustration of the days of Daumier and Doré.
I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there, far or near; yet if I didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am I now so convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary projector of Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in a world of dangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance?
Ratapoil abounds in the promiscuous drawings that I have looked over, and is always very strong and living, with a considerable element of the sinister, so often in Daumier an accompaniment of the comic.
"Guys exercised on Gavarni an influence which brought into being his Invalides du sentiment, his Lorettes vielles, and his Fourberies de femmes." It is not quite fair to compare Guys with Rops, or indeed with either Gavarni or Daumier. These were the giants of French illustration at that epoch.
Daumier became more and more the political spirit of the Charivari, or at least the political pencil, for M. Philipon, the breath of whose nostrils was opposition one perceives from here the little bilious, bristling, ingenious, insistent man is to be credited with a suggestive share in any enterprise in which he had a hand.
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