This catalogue and its companion volume of essays are published in conjunction with the exhibition "The Private Collection of Edgar Degas," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from October 1, 1997, to January 11, 1998.

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.

This comprehensive survey lays out in chronological progression the lives and works of the artists whose masterpieces make up the history of European painting, from the late Gothic masters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the Cubists and Surrealists of the early twentieth century, to the postmodernists of our own day. In the work of these artists we can observe the great movements of art history - the dawn of the Renaissance, the birth of Realism, and the rise of abstraction. The artists are represented by full-color illustrations of their most important and characteristic paintings, accompanied by concise, authoritative discussions of their life and work.