Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)

Born: 1808
Died: 1879
Nationality: French

Biography of Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier worked as a cartoonist on La Caricature, founded in 1830, and was imprisoned in 1832 for representing King Louis Philippe as Gargantua. After the suppression of La Caricature in 1835, he joined Charivari, and made, for this and other similar journals, some 4,000-odd lithographs, mostly of the aptest and bitterest political and social satire. His watercolours and wash drawings of scenes in the Courts of Justice, and everyday life, are untouched by any romantic feeling for picturesque poverty and his large oil-paintings, many on the theme of Don Quixote, are loosely handled, with calligraphic brushwork and intense light and shadow. He became blind in his old age, and was rescued from desperate poverty by Corot. He also made some sculptures: all thirty-six of his series of bronze heads are in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. There are works in Baltimore, Boston, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Philadelphia, Washington, and elsewhere.