20 Essential Works by Honoré Daumier – Ranked
Twenty works trace Honoré Daumier’s career from the July Monarchy and political censorship to Parisian life, the press, the art world and his later social satire.
Honoré Daumier spent much of the nineteenth century drawing politics, newspapers, courts, artists and the everyday life of Paris. His career began under the July Monarchy and continued through repeated changes of regime, censorship and war. These twenty works follow different parts of that long career.
Un héros de juillet, Mai 1831
Honoré Daumier was born in Marseille in 1808. His family moved to Paris while he was still young, placing him in the city that would supply most of the people, institutions and arguments found in his work.
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Colored lithograph published in La Caricature.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗Masks of 1831
Daumier learned lithography in Paris and quickly found a place in the illustrated press. The medium suited newspapers and magazines: drawings could be reproduced in large numbers and reach readers far beyond the artist’s studio.
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Clément-François-Victor-Gabriel Prunelle
His association with publisher Charles Philipon brought him into the circle around La Caricature. The magazine made political caricature part of the public fight over Louis-Philippe’s monarchy.
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Very Haughty and Very Mighty Legitimist Brats
Daumier rarely needed an elaborate setting to make a political figure recognizable. Posture, weight, clothing and facial expression often carried as much of the joke as the caption beneath the image.
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The Mother of the Actress
Theatre was one of the many worlds Daumier returned to after political censorship narrowed what could be printed. Actors, audiences and backstage ambitions gave him another set of social types to observe.
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The Ravaged Poets’ Corner
Writers, musicians and artists were regular targets. Daumier knew the cultural press from the inside, and his jokes about creative people often came from the same professional world in which he worked.
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The Landscape Painters
The art world supplied him with critics, collectors and painters who took themselves very seriously. Daumier kept returning to the gap between artistic reputation and what happened in front of the canvas.
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Walk-through of an Influential Critic
He was equally suspicious of the people who decided what counted as good art. Critics appear in his work as participants in the same social machinery as collectors, dealers and ambitious artists.
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The Connoisseur
In 1860 Daumier temporarily lost his regular position at Le Charivari. During that period he produced more finished drawings and watercolours for private buyers, including works built around the figure of the art collector.
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Two Drinkers
Not everything was made for reproduction. His drawings and paintings often stayed close to ordinary Parisian life: drinkers, travellers, workers and people caught in small moments rather than public events.
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Madame Gargantua
The name Gargantua had followed Daumier since his early career. In 1831 he used Rabelais’s giant to attack Louis-Philippe, a cartoon that eventually led to a prison sentence.
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Oh, You Are… Guilty — and What Do You Want Me to Do About It?
Lawyers and courts became another long-running subject. Daumier repeatedly drew the performance of authority inside the courtroom, often paying as much attention to gesture as to the legal argument itself.
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Galileo, Astonished by Changes in the Face of the Earth
Historical figures could be pulled into current events whenever Daumier needed them. His cartoons often depended on readers recognising a reference and then seeing how it had been shifted into nineteenth-century politics.
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Victor Hugo
After the political changes of 1848, Daumier again drew elected representatives. Victor Hugo appears in a series of legislative portraits made after the writer entered the Legislative Assembly.
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From the series Les Représentans Représentés.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗Le Cauchemar (The Nightmare)
Louis-Philippe was repeatedly reduced to the shape of a pear in the opposition press. Daumier used the same shorthand here, placing the king literally on Lafayette’s chest as the weight of a political decision.
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Le ventre législatif
Daumier modelled many politicians in clay before translating their features into prints. That physical way of thinking about faces helps explain why his parliamentary figures can look almost sculpted even on a flat sheet of paper.
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The Past, the Present, and the Future
By 1834 the relationship between the opposition press and Louis-Philippe had become openly hostile. In this period Daumier’s political work was direct enough that the government increasingly treated caricature as a problem to be controlled.
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Mlle. Etienne-Joconde-Cunégonde-Bécassin de Constitutionnel…
Newspapers themselves could become characters. Here Daumier turned the conservative journal Le Constitutionnel into a human figure, using caricature to attack not only politicians but the press that supported them.
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The Witnesses — The War Council
Daumier was still drawing political conflict near the end of his career. The authorities stopped this print from being published; The Met records only one known impression of the work.
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Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834
In April 1834 government troops entered a building on Rue Transnonain during unrest in Paris and killed its inhabitants. Daumier did not turn the event into a crowded battle scene. The room and the bodies were enough.
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Published as plate 24 of L’Association Mensuelle. The Met dates this impression to July 1834.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
