By combining Daumier's drawings with selected examples of his paintings, prints, and bronzes, this book traces the evolution of the artist's succinct and emphatically expressive style from its roots in the European tradition exemplified by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fragonard to its modern manifestations in the works of Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Beckmann. In the course of his long and productive career Daumier returned again and again to favorite themes, often after considerable lapses of time. Thus the works here are grouped by their subject matter into six sections: studies of individual figures and faces; narrative scenes inspired by history or literature; views of contemporary urban and domestic life; dramatic portrayals of lawyers in court; depictions of street performers; and episodes in the wanderings of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

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.

Daumier emerges as an artist of exceptional genius and modernity in this volume.

Ranked alongside Ingres by Baudelaire as the finest draughtsman in Paris and matched as a political caricaturist in the nineteenth century only by Goya, Honoré Daumier 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.

The life and work of one of the most productive and renowned French artists of the nineteenth century is examined in this beautiful book. Known primarily in his own time for the penetrating social and political commentary of his cartoons, Daumier is now equally admired for his drawings, watercolours, and oil paintings. Bruce Laughton draws on new material to present the most comprehensive treatment of this multi-faceted artist in two decades. Laughton traces Daumier's professional life: his early career as a lithographer-cartoonist, when his fame as a social satirist spread through all classes of French citizens; his attempts to change direction as an 'artist-peintre' with the advent of the Second French Republic; his painstaking production of watercolours for connoisseurs (and his simultaneous parody of these people); and then the independent development of his oil painting techniques alongside his continued production of lithographs and designs for wood engravings. Laughton also discusses Daumier's private life, investigating, for example, his view of the lawcourts, the significance of his 'Saltimbanques' or wandering entertainers, and the personal symbolism of his images of Don Quixote. In conclusion Laughton describes Daumier's late career, which included both personal disasters and artistic achievements and ended in the most unsung retirement of any artist of comparable stature in the nineteenth century. An appendix to the book provides transcriptions and commentary on five of Daumier's account books, which give clues about how he lived and how his works were regarded.