Honoré Daumier

France’s best-known caricaturist of the 19th century, Honoré Daumier was also a prolific painter, lithographer and sculptor, celebrated for his sharp-witted, satirical work that unabashedly critiqued the political and social issues of his time.

Born in 1808 in Marseille, Honoré-Victorin Daumier moved to Paris with his family at a young age, where he became fascinated with the art scene. His father, an aspiring poet and playwright, once worked as a clerk in bankruptcy court to support his family. He found for the twelve-year-old Daumier a job as a bailiff’s errand boy. Throughout his career as an artist and illustrator, Daumier retained a fascination for the real-life drama of the law courts, and made the judicial business a leading, definitive theme in his work.

In around 1822 Daumier trained in the fundamentals of art as a pupil under Alexandre Lenoir, the founder of the Musée national des Monuments Français, and later attended the Académie Suisse to further his artistic training. Daumier took up lithography — then a relatively new form of printmaking that helped proliferate the rise and mass production of the art of the caricature in France, which was already established and made popular in England by the works of William Hogarth and his contemporaries. Daumier began producing illustrations, advertisements, portraits and caricatures in the mid to late 1820s.

From the 1830s, Daumier joined the satirical magazine La Caricature, where he created biting portrayals of the French monarchy, the bourgeoisie and government officials. His works, such as the infamous caricature of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua (1831), were so provocative that Daumier was imprisoned for six months.

In addition to his lithographs, Daumier also painted, notably images of Don Quixote riding his horse, drew and sculpted. Daumier would go on to produce an astonishingly vast body of work — over 4,000 lithographs, 100 sculptures, 500 paintings, 1,000 drawings and 1,000 wood engravings — throughout his life, profoundly influencing a generation of artists that followed.