Daumier and Gavarni, with critical and biographical notes
Holme, Charles, 1848-1923 | Frantz, Henri | Uzanne, Octave, 1852-1931 | Preston, Edgar | Chisholm, Helen
■M.jLi i % ..^ ^^>^ms^^ SS!<l%^rf- \,4 ij NVMBEE X: .}..y ;.AVA,R.NI -m ■ ■ ■^'T'^^^. wm I H ' " , / v ,-'■- [^'j^ 79 " ■^■- „ '':'^'^ -'• * ^^H ' "■■ ■-■ '^-\-:'-rJr^ '-'". - "< '"5.' 'T'-'r- '< '"■ - aspi -■'- ■'-',■»>■'' [ -'. .-'^ '-'■ --■_;;' ',, <:'«, ^ ** -^ * c /• . • ;: \^^-c;'_^-i: /--r. r^V- ■ ■' - • . . '•• ^Dr^^^' ;;'*C"; "■'{:,•"■ University of California • Berkeley ESTATE OF YNEZ GHIRARDELLI ^— :i;i^i^ I ^C'^*^*-^-^-- DAUMIER AND GAVARNI WITH CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES BY HENRI FRANTZ AND OCTAVE UZANNE Edited by Charles Holme OFFICES OF ,THE STUDIO,' LONDON PARIS, NEW YORK MCMIV Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/dauniiergavarniwiOOholmrich PREFATORY NOTE THE chief source of most ot the humorous work in France throughout the nineteenth century was, as it still continues to be, the illustrated comic journals. In the pages of Le Charivari more especially, some of the finest work of this class that has ever been done made its appearance, and it was for this journal that both Daumier and Gavarni made many of the drawings reproduced in the following pages. In the early part of the past century the principal cartoons in the comic papers were printed by lithography, and as the artists made their drawings directly upon the stone, the result was a much more perfect reproduction of their work than is usually obtainable by wood-engraving. Stone was the medium which Daumier and Gavarni employed more than any other for their work, and both artists hold rank amongst the most accomplished lithographic draughtsmen the world has produced. To see the great superiority of lithography over wood-engraving in its retention of every feature of the original handwork, it is only necessary to compare the lithographs by either of these men with the reproductions of the same drawings on wood, which have from time to time been made for the purpose of illustrating certain books published in France and elsewhere. In selecting illustrations preference has, therefore, been chiefly given to the lithographs. Among the other sources trom which the illustrations here reproduced have been taken, mention must also be made of La Caricature^ Les Beaux Arts^ U Artiste, Les Modes Parisiennes, La Gazette Musicale, Le Boulevard, Masques et Visages, and Gavarni in London. The Editor desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to those who, by loan of original impressions and photographs, or in other ways, have rendered him assistance in the preparation of this volume. His thanks are particularly due to M. Loys Delteil, M. Beurdeley, and Messrs. Durand-Ruel et Fils, of Paris ; Mr. E. J. van Wisselingh, of London and Amsterdam ; and Mr. Walter Ledger, of Wimbledon. The courtesy of the authorities of the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, who granted permission for the reproduction of the drawings in the lonides Collection, must also be acknowledged. The essay of M. Octave Uzanne has been translated by Mr. Edgar Preston, and that of M. Henri Frantz by Miss Helen Chisholm. ' Travestissemen ts " ( 8 ) g 5 5" ' Paysanne de Kochersberg" g 56 * On a Sunday afternoon " g 5 7 ' They are not going to make me pose" g 58 ' Would they make fun of me "059 * A former Member of the Ballet" g 60 ' The King of Jesters " g 61 **'An Ex-chorister" g 62 " I don't want anybody to make fun of me " g 62, LIST OF SPECIAL PLATES NOT INCLUDED IN THE FOREGOING DAUMIER Portrait of Daumier. Tinted Reproduction from the Etching by Loys Delteil Frontispiece to "Daumier Monograph *' Les Buveurs." Reproduction in Photogravure facing page d ii ^*L'Amateur." Reproduction in Photogravure „ „ d iv ^' La Fin de TAudience." Reproduction in Photogravure „ „ d vi Portrait of Corot. Reproduction in Tints „ „ d viii ** Le Wagon de Troisieme Classe." Reproduction in Photogravure „ „ d xii *' La Devanture." Reproduction in Tint „ „ d xvi " Les Amateurs d'Estampes." Reproduction in Tint „ „ d xviii Facsimile of Letter „ „ d xx " Actualites." " Comment, j'achete votre journal," etc. Reproduction in Colours „ „ d xx '* Les Baigneuses." " EUe a encore tout d'meme une jolie taille," etc. Reproduction in Colours „ plate d 2 ** Les Bas Bleus." " Adieu, mon cher," etc. Reproduction in Colours „ ,, D 6 ** Les Alarmistes et les Alarmes." " Eh ! qu'est-ce qu'il y a de nouveau ? " etc. Reproduction in Colours „ „ d 1 2 " Les Cinq Sens." " L'Odorat." Reproduction in Colours „ „ d i8 *' Emotions Parisiennes." " Ah bas ! " Reproduction in Colours „ „ d 32 " McEurs Conjugales." " C'est ma femme." Reproduction in Colours „ », d 36 " Types Parisiens." " B'en parlez pas," etc. Reproduction in Colours „ „ d 48 GAVARNI Portrait of Gavarni. Tinted reproduction from the Litho- graph by himself in Le Journal des Beaux-Arts, 1 843 Frontispiece to Ga'varni MonografJt " La Femme a Polyte." Reproduction in Colours " 1792." Reproduction in Tints " The Cave." Reproduction in Tints Facsimile of Letter " La Boite aux Lettres." " L'Ecrivain Public " " Travestissements Originaux pour les Bals de 1834" facing page G viii „ G xii „ G xxii „ G xxxvi plate G 8 G 54 & 55 r 1^- ^;j J'] H. DAUMIER. From the Etching by LOYS DELTEIL. THE LIFE AND WORK OF DAUMIER. BY HENRI FRANTZ. I HE name ot Honore Daumier stands prominent as that of one among the greatest and most original personalities in the history of French art during the nineteenth century. With his extraordinary fertility of production and the abnormal violence of his conceptions, he would almost seem to have strayed by mistake into his era. Many men of talent may imitate him, he may be the father of modern caricature, he may have had a powerful influence upon succeeding generations ; but Daumier himself had no immediate predecessor, and he is all the greater for that. He stands alone ; and is perhaps more nearly akin to some inspired genius of the middle ages, whose ardour and impassioned faith are all his own. Even within the restricted field of lithographic art, Daumier is always huge and immoderate ; we feel that he could as easily undertake some gigantic task, could cover a building with colossal frescoes ; and we understand the complete justice of Balzac's pronouncement when he said : " There is some- thing of the Michael Angelo in this man ! " Not only does Daumier show himself, by the quality ot his work in lithography and painting, by the potency of his satire and the sparkle of his wit, one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century, to whom we willingly assign a place beside a Balzac, a Victor Hugo, a Delacroix ; but he also astounds us by his immense productivity. To give some idea of this, I may recall the fact that it took M. Loys Delteil four years of assiduous labour, fortified by an erudition quite beyond the common, to compile in one large volume the catalogue of his lithographed works, apart from his paintings and drawings. And this single volume of mere enumeration introduces to us no less than 3,958 plates. No one, therefore, better deserves to be studied and discussed in one of those special monographs of The Studio which have treated of Corot, of Millet, of Turner, and wherein Daumier figures to-day beside Gavarni like strength as opposed to charm, power as opposed to grace, glowing faith as opposed to airy scepticism. For, with very different qualities, these two men of genius have produced work which has remained young, from which years have taken nothing of its savour ; which, apart from some details of purely contemporary D i DAUMIER interest, attracts and delights us as much as it did our fathers. I will therefore attempt to give in these pages a slight sketch of the life and work of Daumier, a task which is rendered easy by the various excellent publications of our own time dealing with the great caricaturist, and to these I refer my readers for more detailed and profound study. They will find food for their curiosity in the *' Histoire de la Caricature Moderne," by Champfleury ; in the studies of Beraldi (" Graveurs du XIX^^^ Siecle"), of Montrosier in " L'Art," of Duranti in the " Gazette des Beaux-Arts." They may read with profit the numerous articles and criticisms published in 1878, at the time of the first exhibition of the master's work in the Galerie Durand-Ruel ; and they will be impressed by Gustave GefFroy's beautiful Preface to the Catalogue of the Daumier Exhibi- tion organised three years ago in the rooms of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts by the Syndicat de la Presse Artistique. Let us further note that Arsene Alexandre published a bulky volume upon the master in 1888 ; and that, finally, MM. Hazard and Loys Delteil compiled the complete catalogue of his lithographs in 1904. This latter publication aims, above all, at completing, by the abundance of its illustrations, what has hitherto been published concerning the artist, and by fidelity of reproduction giving some idea of Daumier's finest original lithographs, executed by the master at various times for the different journals to which he contributed, notably "Le Charivari" and " La Caricature," certain very interesting examples of which are lent us by M. Delteil for the present article. Honore Daumier was born at Marseilles on the 26th February, 1808. His mother was a Marseillaise ; his father, a native of Beziers, was a mediocre poet who had not sufficient insight to divine the future genius in the seven-year-old boy, already passionately fond of drawing. Indeed, he attempted to stifle Honore's dawning vocation, but could not prevent the child from drawing assiduously in secret and studying the old masters in the Louvre. There he learned to understand and love first the antique, and afterwards the Dutch and Flemish painters, from whom he seems in certain works to have borrowed some of their sturdy good-nature and expansive jollity. But these growing inclinations, this bent that was asserting itself so decidedly, did not prevent the elder Daumier from placing young Honore with a huissier * ; and from this period dates his first acquaintance with those men of the law — ushers, judges, barristers, all those gens de justice, in short — whom later he was to * An usher of the law-courts, who also performs some of the duties of a bailiff or sherifFs officer, e.g. the serving of writs. — Translator's Note. D ii DAUMIER ridicule and scourge so smartly in many immortal lithographs and water-colours. This first attempt at making a career having proved unsuccessful, the experiment v^^as tried of placing Honore w^ith a bookseller, but in vain ; there too he would listen to nothing, attend to nothing, that had not to do with the inward vocation of his heart ; and at last, tired of the struggle, his family agreed to let him draw, following the advice of the archaeologist Lenoir, to whom he was entrusted for the completion of his artistic education by means of lengthy visits to the galleries. It was then that the young artist — who in face of the classical teaching of Lenoir manifested an independence of spirit and a love of nature little countenanced in those days, and well calculated to disturb the mind of the old archaeologist — began, with an astounding intuition, to understand the future possibilities of lithography, and resolved to shape his course in that direction. As chance willed it, for it happened that at this time he made friends with a young litho- grapher named Ramelet, who initiated him into the first secrets of his craft. Daumier gave himself up to this study with the more zest that he found in it an unhoped-for means of gaining a liveli- hood ; for we find him from the first executing plates for manu- facturers and for music-publishers. At the same time, after a short sojourn at Boudin's academy, he worked a great deal from nature, studied the human body, and attained that exhaustive knowledge of the play of muscle, brilliantly exhibited in so many of his daring bits of anatomy. From 1829 oi^ward he did anonymous work for the publishers. One of these latter was Zephyrin Belliard, who condemned the artist to many an ungrateful task, by making him undertake commonplace, uninteresting subjects. For Ricourt he did some lithographs in the style of Charlet, in which we feel that he is subjected to the epic influence of the Napoleonic era. One of them represents a soldier looking with contempt at a cannon-ball which is burying itself in the ground at a little distance from him, with this legend : " Passe ton chemin, cochon ! " (" Get along, you swine ! ") ; another, an old peasant pressing to his heart the flag that recalls so many campaigns ; whilst in a third, entitled " Victimes de la Revolution," two grisettes are shown walking sad and solitary in the Tuileries. All this work is still very timid in execution and uncertain in manner ; but, like that which followed, executed for Hautecceur-Martinet, for Philipon, and for the Maison Aubert, it already gives promise of the future master, both in technique and in conception. From the special point of view of lithography, Daumier had at first D iii DAUMIER imitated Charlet, as we have seen ; he also owed much to Grandville and to Pigal, although keeping far aloof from their conception of caricature. We now arrive at the first years of Louis Philippe's reign, which mark the most fruitful period of French caricature in the nineteenth century, as regards not only political satire but the satire of bourgeois society. It was at this date that Charles Philipon, with a rare judgment, both as newspaper editor and political agitator, gathered around him certain men of talent who incarnated those ideas of dissatisfaction and revolt which sprang up trom the very beginning of this monarch's reign. Philipon had at first been a genial delineator of contemporary manners under the Restoration. " He whom we looked on as a charming provider of amusement for students and counter-jumpers on a holiday, suddenly took the sur- prising tack of becoming a great revolutionist, a shaker of thrones, and a Titan of laughter. With his fine hatred for the new regime of July, which had so traitorously conjured away the ideal of all young France, Philipon found himself one morning transfigured, as it were, and grown to a giant's stature, in consequence of the role of political agitator assumed by him with such heroic swagger. Setting himself up as a personal enemy of the king, and declaring war to the death against him, he forged an admirable weapon of warfare by creating the distinct type of the modern illustrated satirical journal. " And not only was he a founder of newspapers, but he aroused and disinterred the talent of a whole phalanx of artists who without him might never have made their way. Communicating his own indignations and audacities to fifteen or twenty young draughtsmen whom he had grouped around him, he commanded them to have genius at the service of the great cause of Liberty, and he indicated to them the recipe they should follow in order to attain this end." * Who were these artists that Philipon thus collected together in an ardent struggle against a detested movement and an unpopular Government ; who, without having the genius of Daumier, strove by his side with the play of fancy, the fire, the feeling of revolt which animate the Forains, the Caran d'Aches, the Willettes ot to-day in a similar cause ? There was Grandville, whose wonderful "Processions politiques" show so much precision in the rendering of faces, together with a special feeling for vast crowds and the surging of humanity. Then there were Raffet, whom Philipon contrived to snatch for an hour from his studies of military life, and make him produce biting satires against any attempt to fetter the liberty of the press ; Auguste Bouquet, a man of powerful and ♦ R. Deberdt : "La Caricature et I'Humour Fran9ais au XIX-^ Siicle." D iv TROM A DH AWING BY pj. DAUMTER "^ '^HE DURAKTD -RUSI- COL^LSmC-TICOt. SIUO\0 Y DAUMIER energetic talent ; Despret, who, notwithstanding his coldness, suc- ceeded in making many interesting satirical drawings ; and, further, Julien, Jacques Arago, and the painter Deveria. These artists, to whom were joined Monnier, Travies, and Pigal, who specialised more in sketches of life and manners, and of whom we shall have something to say later, formed a powerful band around Philipon, and composed the staff of "La Caricature," that journal which played so prominent a part during the reign of Louis Philippe, preparing, from the first years of this bourgeois reign, the Revolution of 1848. Amongst these artists Daumier early signalised himself by his vivacity and his strength ; every day there was some invention more witty than the last for the purpose of throwing ridicule upon the sovereign and his rule. Sometimes the long face of Louis Philippe is trans- formed into a pear — that famous pear made historic by the genius of these men ; sometimes it is the prince's avarice that is attacked by their wit ; and there are endless pleasantries upon the royal family. A caricature of the king as a Cain who has just assassinated Liberty made a great stir, as did the lithograph which shows us Louis Philippe walking with rapid step alongside a wall whereon his shadow forms the silhouette of a woman with a Phrygian cap on her head, pursuing him dagger in hand. Daumier's personality distinguished and asserted itself still further in his " Masques de 1831," which appeared in " La Caricature " of the 8th March, 1832. Fifteen separate masks, ranged in three rows, figure in this plate : each of them bears either the first letters ot the name or the nickname of the person caricatured. Beginning at the top left-hand side, these are : Etienne, Guizot, Madier de Montjau, Thiers, Athalin, Lameth, Dupin, a pear representing Louis Philippe, D'Argout, Keratry, Barthe, Marshal Lobau, Soult, and Schonen. Of the same period as this work are the burlesque busts of Lameth, of Dupin, and of Soult, which already foreshadow the magnificent portraits that Daumier was to give us later. It was at this time that occurred a very important event in the artist's life. I speak of his imprisonment at Ste. Pelagic, which put the crown to his reputation, and set him on a martyr's throne. The plate which obtained for him this triumphal sentence was not, however, more violent than its predecessors. Under the title of " Gargantua," we are shown a long-visaged personage bearing a distant resemblance to Louis Philippe, seated upon a throne in a robe of state. A long plank leads from the ground to his mouth, and on this there is a constant coming and going of little persons dressed as senators, as ministers, or as deputies, who feed him with D T DAUMIER gold pieces which he gives back transformed into decorations, commissions and marshals' batons ; whilst in the right-hand corner of the composition are seen workmen and poor people who come to cast half their wages into the treasury as a contribution to the needs of the mighty. This work cost its author six months in prison, as was announced by the following paragraph in " La Caricature," of the 30th August, 1832 : "At the moment of our writing these lines, M. Daumier, sentenced to six months' imprisonment for the caricature of * Gargantua,' was arrested under the eyes of his father and mother, whose sole support he is." Despite the check to his work occasioned by this seclusion, the artist bore it with the good-humour characteristic of the South. Besides, according to his biographers, and notably M. Arsene Alexandre, the time was not absolutely wasted. " During this absurd captivity the artist, for want of anything better to do, made many studies of character, by which we have since profited. In fact, hitherto the artist had only manifested the instinct of observation ; after his imprisonment he proved that he had the feeling for it : a feeling that almost amounted to a passion, always wide-awake, and never moving at haphazard, but invariably fixing upon the salient side of things and persons, and engraving its characters with marvellous exactitude upon the mind of the observer. It would be doing the man an injustice to suppose his love of liberty increased by this temporary privation. Minds as lofty as his are not guided by personal rancour. For them principle is everything ; and although later his hatred for political punishments expressed itself in bitter and potent imagery, it was not his own misadventures that inspired it, but rather the misfortunes of others less strong than himself whose sufferings he witnessed."* It was also in prison that he executed in water-colour various sketches which Ramelet afterwards lithographed ; the originals of these no longer exist. In February, 1833, Daumier was released from Ste. Pelagic, intel- lectually matured, and still better prepared for the great campaign of political satire, into which he once more flung himself with ardour beside Grandville and Travies. Between 1833 and 1835 Daumier produced several of his most important works, great both in their perfection of lithographic craftsmanship and in the grandeur of their emotion and inspiration. The portraitist who had been evident in the " Masques," now gave his genius free rein in a series of portraits of the ministers and great personages of his day, which for us are * A. Alexandre: "H. Daumier" (1888). D vi DAUMIER both valuable documents, and also lithographs whose admirable treatment of light and shade fills us with wonder. Not finished to the point of lithographs by Charlet or Deveria, these of Daumier are drawn with almost brutal power, regardless of minute detail, like a fresco by some Michael Angelo of Caricature. And this kinship between the master's portrait-lithographs and sculpture is no mere chance ; we know, in fact, that in preparing for his line-work Daumier would begin by modelling from memory a portrait of his subject in the round ; and the lithograph was but the complement of this preliminary sketch in clay, which represented the original still more faithfully. None of these portraits was ever executed from life, but invariably from memory. It must be observed that this memory was marvellous in extent and accuracy, as Baudelaire records in his " Curiosites Esthetiques," where, indeed, he alludes frequently to the genius who was so familiar to him and so dear. " Daumier's distinguishing note as an artist," he writes, " is his certainty. His drawing is fluent and easy ; it is a continuous improvisation. He has a wonderful, almost super-human memory, from which he works as from a model. His powers of observation are such that in his work we never find a single head that is out of character with the figure beneath it." We cannot do better, indeed, than quote Baudelaire's pronouncement upon this portrait series. " The artist," he writes, " manifests here a marvellous cunning in portraiture : while caricaturing and exaggerating the features of his originals, he yet adheres so faithfully to nature that these productions might serve as models to all portraitists. Here in these animalised faces may be seen and read clearly all the meannesses of soul, all the absurdities, all the aberrations of intelligence, all the vices of the heart ; yet at the same time all is broadly drawn and accentuated. Daumier combined the suppleness of the artist with the exactness of a Lavater. It remains to be noted that his works of this period difi^er considerably from those of the present day. The former are occasionally, though not often, a trifle heavy, but always highly finished, very conscientious, very severe." What are these portraits ? It is not possible for us to discuss them all here ; a succinct enumeration must suffice. The series begins with M. Thiers and M. de Podenas, the latter caught in the act of walking, his whole person exhaling an air of beatific satisfaction ; then come M. Fulchiron de Lyon, with his bigot's head ; M. Viennet, a sort of M. Homais, with a broad red ribbon in his buttonhole ; M. Arle pere^ with a large handkerchief in his hand ; M. Etienne with his imposing velvet waistcoat ; the Dantesque hideousness of -M. D vii DAUMIER Delessert ; M. d'Argout ; M. Cunin Gridaine, a fat, wealthy- looking bourgeois ; M. Royer CoUard, with his loosely hanging coat and his candid expression ; M. Baillot, a true M. Prudhomme ; De 'Keratry with the obsequious bearing of a courtier. After these portraits of deputies and statesmen we come to portraits of the judges who tried the prisoners of April. We know that in consequence of the events of 1834, the Chamber of Peers, sitting as a supreme court, had to consider the political crimes attributed to the accused, who were with scandalous injustice deprived of legal counsel. Naturally the debates were tainted with the grossest partiality ; and while the shameful exhibition was proceeding, Daumier fixed these infamous men in the pillory of history by means of his " Portraits des Juges d'Avril " with Barbe-Marbois presiding among them, an incomparable and extraordinary work, and — as M. Loys Delteil expresses it — " beautiful as a Holbein." At this epoch, when Daumier's muse was possessed by a passion of furious indignation, and when he could apply to himself the cele- brated facit indignatio versum of the Latin poet, the ardent combatant was not content with his portraits alone ; at the same time he con- tributed to " La Caricature " superbly inspired satiric scenes — cruel and stinging inventions that mark the zenith of his talent. His most celebrated works are, in fact, those produced between 1833 and 1835, under the impression of the public scandals of 1834, and stirred by the fine spirit of emulation which permeated that circle of artists and literary men, nicknamed the Bureau des Nourrices on account of its situation, wherein the painter worked side by side with Preault Diaz, Jeanron, Paul Huet, and Cabat. Among the earliest of these famous lithographs, in which the art of the lithographer and the passionate ardour of the caricaturist go hand-in-hand, the " Cortege du Prince Lancelot de Tricanule " claims first attention. It represents Marshal Lobau (celebrated for having dispersed a mob by means of fire-engines), in the guise of Prince Lancelot, accompanied by ushers dressed like apothecaries and carrying various objects of household use. " Ah, tu veux te frotter a la presse ? " (" You wanted to meddle with the press, did you .? ") shows us a journeyman printer with smiling face flattening beneath the press he is working a whiskered personage who is no other than Louis Philippe himself, his legendary umbrella lying at the foot of the machine. " Primo Saignare " is an important composition, comprising four figures. On the left stands Louis Philippe, clad in a long coat ; a hat decorated with a cockade half hides his face ; he is engaged in making an incision D viii ffrom the Durand-Ruel Collection.) S5 m PORTRAIT Of COROT, by Honore Daumier. DAUMIER in the arm of a seated figure with bandaged head. On the right Duke Ferdinand of Orleans stands holding a potion, while Marshal Lobau kneels on one knee, armed with a highly unromantic instru- ment. " Mademoiselle Etiennette Becassine de Constitutionnel '* depicts a box at the theatre. The Constitutionnel is a woman ot huge proportions who is turning away her head and casting down her eyes in obvious affectation ; in one hand is a fan, while with the other she makes the gesture of sweeping away some shocking sight. " Gros Cupide, va ! " is another virulent attack on Louis Philippe. The actor Lepeintre, in the role of Tragala in a play named " Vingt Ans plus Tard," resembled Louis Philippe in face and bearing. At least so he is represented by Daumier here, clad in the uniform of a gendarme officer — of a chief of alguazils, as the inscription says — clapping his stomach with an air of knowing satisfaction. " Repos de la France " (" France at Rest ") : — here, bestially slumbering on the throne, with his head fallen on his chest, Louis Philippe (the system) is holding a cudgel instead of a sceptre, while behind him is seen the Republic with bound hands, and the Gallic cock plucked of its feathers. Guns without their carriages are at his feet. In " Baissez le rideau, la farce est jouee " (" Lower the curtain, the farce is over ") we have Louis Philippe again ; this time as a clown facing the spectator, and saluting the public before lowering the curtain upon a Parliamentary sitting. Under the title " Recompense aux electeurs obeissants" ("Rewards for obedient electors") we are shown the king standing beside a cask filled with orders and decorations, and affixing the cross to three personages who represent the obedient electors. At the back the independents are standing about the door of the election-room, seeming indisposed to share in the distribution of favours. In another plate, " Voyage a travers les populations empressees " ("Journey among an enthusiastic population"), Louis Philippe, mounted on a lean horse, is crossing a desert plain strewn with corpses, while in the sky above hover flocks of carrion crows. Disguised as a miller in the " Moulin du Telegraph," Louis Philippe shows himself at a little upper window, whilst at the door various personages — Thiers, Soult, and Persil — are either receiving money or going off carrying heavy bags of coin. Several productions of this period rise to a tragic grandeur well calculated to move us now even after the lapse of seventy years. For instance, " Celui-la on peut le mettre en liberte, il n'est plus dangereux" ("That one may be set free, he is no longer dangerous"), the weird sadness of which Goya would not deny. We are amid the cold surroundings of a prison ; the poor wretch who has ceased D ix DAUMIER to be dangerous lies stretched on a pallet in an attitude of suffering ; his face is pale, his beard neglected, his forehead, doubtless pierced by a bullet, is swathed in a bandage. Beside him stand two men. The nearest, Louis Philippe, holds the dying man's hand, and, seeing how incapable of further offence the poor fellow has become, gives the order for his release to the judge, who listens with the prim and submissive air of a courtier. It would, I think, be difficult to deny that in his eagerness to attack Louis Philippe and to drag in the mud a monarch whose only crime was that of being too weak, Daumier manifests a somewhat exaggerated prejudice ; in any case that is a matter for the historian. Our task here is to mark the importance of his work and point out its merits. There is no doubt that many lithographs of this period are real masterpieces. Let us select two in this series. First the magnificent plate of the 14th May, 1835 : " Vous avez la parole ; expliquez vous, vous etes libre ! " (" You may speak ; explain yourself, you are free ! ") It is a scene in the tribunal ; the president has a mocking air as he sits in his chair of office. With his head sunk between his shoulders and his hands outspread with a taunting gesture, he addresses the above words to an accused prisoner. But it is impossible for the latter to reply, for a gag is stuffed into his mouth ; and despite his desperate efforts to speak and defend himself, he is held in his place by four judges who clutch at his arms and his neck ; close by another condemned man has his head on the block, while a judge is turning up his shirt-sleeves in order to strike the more easily. Then there is the famous " Rue Transnonain," published some months before the work of which I have just spoken. This is a virulent satire upon the excesses committed by the infatuated soldiery on inoffensive citizens. In a humble, dimly-lighted chamber, bearing every sign of pillage, a man in his shirt is extended at the foot of a bed against which a chair has been overturned ; a little child is crushed beneath the corpse of the unfortunate man ; on the right is the bald head of an old man bathed in blood ; and at the back, near the door, is visible the corpse of a woman who has also been murdered by the soldiers in their blind demoralisation. The laws of September curtailing the liberty of the press were to cause Honore Daumier's talent to strike out in a new direction. The journal " La Caricature," attacked by the new decrees, went down at once with a crash ; whereupon Daumier devoted himself almost exclusively to " Le Charivari," the new satiric paper, fruit of the ever-ebullient activity of Philipon, which had been appearing D X DAUMIER since the ist December, 1832. Daumier had been one of its contributors from the very beginning, and had published in it a number of sensational political caricatures. But the persecutions of the censure would not allow the able artist to continue in his first line. Let us rejoice thereat, since thanks to this we were to behold Daumier taking a new turn, and directing his attention to the life and manners of his time. Perhaps his talent here appears less powerful, less vigorous ; but what treasures of humour, wit, and mischief henceforward issued almost daily from his hand ! We have already seen that during his imprisonment at Ste. Pelagie, Daumier had studied human nature pretty closely, and had felt and expressed in clever little works the follies and inconsistencies of those with whom he came in contact. He was therefore perfectly well prepared to embark upon sketches of society high and low, side by side with Henry Monnier, Cham, and Gavarni, whose reputation at times equalled his own, and whose names cannot be left unmentioned when society sketches of the middle of the nineteenth century are in question. Henry Monnier, older by some years than the author of the " Rue Transnonain," was to a certain extent his forerunner as a depicter of contemporary manners. Was it not he, indeed, who first repre- sented in his clever drawings the bourgeois^ upon whom Daumier in his turn was now to seize ? But while Monnier drew the bourgeois hardly caricatured, only occasionally overstated, Daumier, with his sublime exaggeration, elevated his scenes of middle-class life into a sort of epic. Monnier, in his concise, laborious, harmoniously finished compositions, wherein decorative arrangement is never dis- regarded, is more nearly akin to the Flemish artists, who were also so successful in hitting off the bourgeoisie of their day. Daumier, on the contrary, cared little about decorative arrangement ; a thousand times greater than Monnier and his other contemporaries, he draws all his best effects from them themselves ; from their gestures faith- fully noted by the power of memory already brought to bear upon his poetic portraits, from their muscular and skeletal structure, the huge absurdity of which at once strikes him. It is by this Balzac-like grandiloquence that he rises so far above Gavarni, who was -doubtless more charming, more graceful, and, let us confess it, more of an artist. Gavarni, besides, was infinitely wittier ; he had the knack of devising telling inscriptions for^his pictures, a task which Daumier generally left to Philipon. But he had not that sense of real life which astounds us in Daumier's work, any more than he had the power of drawing, of forceful modelling, D xi DAUMIER which characterises Daumier's slightest sketch. In one word, if Daumier is the Michael Angelo of caricature, Gavarni is its Raphael. All three — Monnier, Gavarni, and Daumier — with all their differences of talent and temperament, are thorough artists, and each created an immortal type. To Monnier we owe " M. Prudhomme," to Gavarni " Thomas Vireloque," to Daumier " Robert Macaire." Daumier had chosen this personage from the hero of a melodrama then popular, played by the celebrated actor Frederic Lemaitre, and made of him a mouthpiece for his ideas and opinions. This " Robert Macaire " series is among the master's most popular achievements, although it does not contain his finest plates, for the great success of these lithographs was due to their aptness at the moment. More especially we must descry in the actions and speeches of Robert Macaire a satire upon the financial events of the period, which was greatly given to speculations and operations on the Bourse. Robert Macaire accordingly sometimes figures as some official bigwig, who refuses the smallest pecuniary assistance to his friends who have remained poor ; sometimes, on a platform at a fair, he tries to attract the crowd by his rattle, making them all sorts of advantageous offers ; sometimes, as an insolvent commission agent, he stands in front of his closed cash-box and replies to some creditor with a curt refusal — all allusions to actual events of bankruptcy, or to some swindling speculation of the moment, which appeal less to us than they did to Daumier's contemporaries. There is one criticism to be made on these productions : their inscriptions are too long. We know, moreover, that they were not written by Daumier. " Those flowing inscriptions," writes M. Albert Wolff, in the " Figaro " of [3th February, 1879, "which did more for him than his art, great as that was — those inscriptions were not his own. Daumier flung upon the stone the men of his time without other preoccupation than that of the artist. But an ingenious wit sat down before the page and found a title for it. Often this wit, whose modest function con- sisted merely in saying to the public, ' You shall see what you shall see,' considered that in so doing he had made Daumier's work his own. Daumier had now arrived at a full mastery of his craft ; hence his extraordinary facility of production and the prodigious number of his plates. We shall presently see that his activity did not stop here, that besides being a lithographer he was an able and talented painter. To get some idea at once of the variety of his inspiration and its unequalled fertility, a glance should be given at the fine catalogue of Daumier's lithographs which we owe to M. Loys Delteil. The latter is a connoisseur of the first water, endowed with certainty of method and the patient spirit of research. He has long loved Daumier's work ; has collected many proofs before letters of his finest lithographs, which he permits us to reproduce here ; and it is safe to say that there is not a plate of Daumier's which has not passed under his notice and been registered in his volume. It contains, indeed, the list ne varietur of the master's works, which cannot of course be even enumerated within the limits of the present essay. We must content ourselves with a brief glance at the more important among them ; and the lithographs that are here faithfully reproduced will speak more eloquently than words. First of all, however, let us see what was the artist's life at the time, and in what surroundings he was moving. Daumier was then such as he is represented in a recent etching executed by M. Loys Delteil from data not heretofore published. He was very broad-shouldered, his head rather big, with slightly sunken eyes which must, however, have had an extraordinary power of penetration. Though the nose is a little heavy and inelegant, the projecting forehead, unusually massive like that of Victor Hugo or of Beethoven, and barred with a determined furrow, reveals the great thinker, the man of lofty and noble aspirations. The rather long hair, thrown backward, adds to the frank expression of the fine head ; and finally the beard worn en collier according to the then prevailing fashion, gives to Daumier's face the distinctive mark of his period. His life was shared, and continued to be shared, between his work (he generally had many drawings in hand at the same time ; and often two or three lithographic stones on which a beginning:; had D xiii DAUMIER been made would be lying together on his little table) and some noble friendships. He was a member of that lie Saint Louis colony of artists, among whom were to be counted Corot, Daubigny, Jules Dupre, Boulard, and the great sculptor Barye. All of them esteemed and admired Daumier, watching him through the various phases of his talent ; but in the first rank of his admirers we must not forget our great Delacroix, who delighted to spend hours copying drawings in which Daumier depicts the human form. All the noble aspirations of these men towards an art freed from pseudo- classicism were represented in his work ; their struggles for truth and life, for liberty of imagination. Daumier encouraged and supported them. Was it not he who from the first had declared war upon the spurious antique in his series entitled " L'Histoire Ancienne " ? We must not imagine in this either contempt or irreverence for the antique ; but only a very incisive protest, a truly intellectual reaction, against the spurious classicism of the Schools. Do not let us forget that Academicism has been the dangerous precipice on whose verge French pictorial art has ever trembled, the reef on which it has many a time run aground ; and this above all in Daumier's period. Nobody loved the antique more than he, nor better understood its real beauty ; but the caricaturist, representing in this matter the will of his artistic co-religionists, wanted to destroy once for all and condemn to eternal ridicule the childish adoption of Greek and Roman cast-off^ clothing, and the everlasting subjects from antiquity with which the professors of aesthetics tried to batter down the youthful talent that rallied round the banner of romanticism. So he turned antique heroes and gods into comic bourgeois figures, and made us laugh at the prudent Ulysses, the ebullient Achilles, the austere Penelope, or the sage Telemachus, presented to us in the most absurd situations, clad in impossible tinsels, and always of an epic ugliness. What amusing fantasies those were, and how life- like ; despite the absolute whimsicality which presided at their birth ! For Daumier never embarked upon anything without a thorough knowledge of his subject ; and when he thus undertook to ridicule the false gods he made a close study of antiquity as a whole. Indeed, only one who had made such a study could have extracted its prodigious comicality ; and we know how from his early youth Daumier had studied the ancients in his visits to the galleries and in his reading. It is on this solid learning that is based the sustained interest of this series; there is little or no flagging; Hercules cleaning the stables of Augeas, Theseus lost in the D xiv DAUMIER labyrinth, the Interview between Alexander and Diogenes, Marius at Minturnae, the Baptism of Achilles, are all scenes of astonishing brio and mad gaiety. Let us look through this marvellous series again ; we here find Hannibal deluging the Alps with bonum vinaigrum d'orleanus ; Minos, ^achus, and Rhadamanthus, three extraordinary judges ; Achilles smoking a pipe in his tent ; Helen abducted by Paris ; Hercules conquered by Love ; and the Death of Anacreon. If Daumier turns heroes into bourgeois^ he makes the bourgeois heroic. Such, at least, is the impression produced by a study of those series entitled respectively " Les Gens de Justice " (" Men of the Law "), " Les Baigneurs " (" The Bathers "), " Les Bons Bourgeois " (" The Honest Bourgeois"), "Les Bas Bleus " ("The Blue-stockings") "Les beaux Jours de la Vie" ("Red-letter Days"), "Les Mceurs Conjugales" ("Conjugal Behaviour"), "Les Pastorales" ("Pastorals"), " Les Types Parisiens" (" Parisian Types ") . He brings his wit to bear on every subject. From the tribunal to the auction-room, from the Stock Exchange to the hospital, from the street to the room of the humble bourgeois^ the inexhaustible humour of the great carica- turist travels untiringly, seizing all the comic aspects of life, catching hold at once of the ridiculous in each situation, the physical and moral weaknesses of each individual. 