Daumier
by Sarah Symmons
from Chaucer Press
Ranked alongside Ingres by Baudelaire as the finest draughtsman in Paris and matched as a political caricaturist in the nineteenth century only by Goya, Honor aumier worked for opposition newspapers throughout the Second Empire, one of the most corrupt and flamboyant periods in French history. He won fame, notoriety, and so a prison sentence, for his prodigious output of caricatures of prominent politicians and his relentless lampooning of the hypocrisy and pretentions of contemporary Parisian moeurs. Sarah Symmons both examines Daumier's role as a professional newspaper artist and explores his more personal body of work, which remained largely unknown during his lifetime. Investigating his series of watercolours and oils of the ordinary citizens of Paris, of the railway travellers, mounte-banks and washerwomen who also people his caricatures, she finds a tragic monumentality far removed from the journalistic cynicism of much of his newspaper work. This quality they share with his more ambitious studies of the dispossessed, of fugitives and emigrants, and of the heroically absurd wanderings of Don Quixote. Often choosing to paint the simple everyday life he saw around him, Daumier was a model example of le peintre de la vie moderne, while his use of pictorial understatement and his painstaking search for absolute simplicity gave many of his pictures an experimental, 'unfinished' quality, which discouraged official recognition, but led to such artists as Picasso, Steinlen and Paul Klee to study his work closely during their formative years. Sarah Symmons has produced a comprehensive analysis of Daumier's career as a painter, sculptor and caricaturist, documenting his striving for the stark and truthful simplicity which gives his finest work an air of universality and permanence, while reflecting the anxieties and insecurity of his own life and times.
Daumier: 120 Great Lithographs (Dover Art Collections)
by Honore Daumier
from Dover Publications
Nine Stories (A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, Just Before the War with the Eskimos, the Laughing Man, Down at the Dinghy, For Esme with Love and Squalor, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, De Daumier Smith's Blue Period, Teddy )
The Drawings of Daumier (Master Draughtsman Series)
from Borden Publishing Company
Doctors and Medicine in the Works of Daumier
The Drawings of Daumier and Millet
Daumier and Millet, two of the most important French artists of the mid 19th century, each produced drawings that were innovative and influential. This book by Bruce Laughton - a critical and comparative study of these drawings - investigates the artistic relationship that existed between Daumier and Millet. Laughton suggests that the two worked at a critical phase in the development of drawing as a language of expression in French art and that a study of their work reveals how new methods of conception and perception in drawing came about. Laughton summarizes the history of the personal relationship between Daumier and Millet from their first meeting in the 1840s. He defines the kind of drawing that they practiced and places it in the context of draftsmanship in France in the first half of the 19th century. He then analyzes their artistic activities during the critical years of 1845-51, situating them in the social and political history of the Second Republic and the inauguration of the Second Empire. Next Laughton compares the style and meaning of the urban and rural images in their drawings during the period from 1851 to 1865. In the final section he discusses certain other similarities in their work: the extent to which their landscape drawings were precursors of Impressionist art; the ways that their illustrations were related to literature of the period; and the effect of the political disasters of 1870-71 on the personal imagery that emerges in their later work. Laughton's definition of drawing is wider than that normally used. He includes lithographs, woodcuts, charcoal, chalk and pencil drawings, pastels and watercolours, and even the graphic treatment of works in oil on canvas in his discussion of creative processes that, he argues, were invented by these two artists to serve their respective needs.
Daumier: Les Bustes des Parlementaires
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