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Updated: June 22, 2025
He was very irritable and not in good health. In Bernard's presence he threw a bust made of him by Solari to the ground, smashing it. It didn't please him. In argument he lost his temper, though he recovered it rapidly. Zola's name was anathema. He said that Daumier drank too much; hence his failure to attain veritable greatness.
There is a magnificent drawing of the series of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is the very medium in which he moves.
The face waits and plots, with a sleepy immobility, covering a hard, indomitable will. It is like a drawing of Daumier, if you can imagine a drawing which renews itself at every instant, in a series of poses to which it is hardly necessary to add words.
Whatever he touches the nude, in the swimming-baths on the Seine, the intimations of landscape, when his petits rentiers go into the suburbs for a Sunday acquires relief and character, Docteur Véron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-Philippe, a Mæcenas of the hour, a director of the opera, author of the Mémoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris this temporary "illustration," who appears to have been almost indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us to-day had not Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to have represented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of naked inconsolable Vitellius.
I possess an original signed lithograph called, The Curious Ones, which shows a procession returning afoot from a funeral. Daumier, himself, could not beat the variety of expressions shown in this print. His death-room scenes are unapproachable in seizing the fleeting atmosphere of the last hour. The fear of death, the very fear of fear, Maeterlinck has created by a species of creeping dialogue.
Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in Le Rire, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the titles of them. December 9. The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds.
This is not the sort of activity that leaves a man much time for independent adventures, and Daumier was essentially of the type, common in France, of the specialist so immersed in his specialty that he can be painted in only one attitude a general circumstance which perhaps helps to account for the paucity, in that country, of biography, in our English sense of the word, in proportion to the superabundance of criticism.
His father had followed the trade of a glazier, but was otherwise vocal than in the emission of the rich street-cry with which we used all to be familiar, and which has vanished with so many other friendly pedestrian notes. The elder Daumier wrought verses as well as window-panes, and M. Champfleury has disinterred a small volume published by him in 1823.
George Cruikshank, as a humorist, has quite as much genius, but he does not know the art of "effect" so well as Monsieur Daumier; and, if we might venture to give a word of advice to another humorous designer, whose works are extensively circulated the illustrator of "Pickwick" and "Nicholas Nickleby," it would be to study well these caricatures of Monsieur Daumier; who, though he executes very carelessly, knows very well what he would express, indicates perfectly the attitude and identity of his figure, and is quite aware, beforehand, of the effect which he intends to produce.
The canny scepticism in the ugly, half-averted face of the typical rustic who considerably suspects his counsellor is indicated by a few masterly strokes. This is what the student of Daumier recognizes as his science, or, if the word has a better grace, his art. It is what has kept life in his work so long after so many of the occasions of it have been swept into darkness.
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