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The Third-Class Carriage
The Third-Class Carriage. Honoré Daumier · Public domain · source

Honoré Daumier

Public domain1808-1879·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Caricaturist, painter and sculptor, born in Marseille on 26 February 1808 and died at Valmondois, north of Paris, in February 1879. He drew for the satirical papers La Caricature and, from 1832, Le Charivari, and produced some 4,000 lithographs, 1,000 wood engravings, 500 paintings and more than 100 sculptures.

Why they matter

He made the newspaper cartoon into art. Thousands of his lithographs, printed for newspapers, drew politicians, lawyers and ordinary Parisians with the seriousness of a painter, and he used the same cheap medium for real political courage: Rue Transnonain is among the most treasured prints of its century.

What to buy

Originals: Daumier is the old master almost anyone can own. Le Charivari printed his lithographs as newspaper pages, so the usual genuine article is a sheet with the image on one side and the paper's text on the back, often showing through. That show-through and an even toning of the paper are normal, and connoisseurs do not mind them; the text on the back is what ties the sheet to the issue it came from. Impressions were also pulled on plain paper with no text on the back ("sur blanc"); for those, ask for provenance as well as the catalogue number. The great political plates of the early 1830s, above all Rue Transnonain, are rare and belong to serious collectors. Many sheets are signed in the stone with his initials, HD. Ask for the Delteil number: Delteil's catalogue of the lithographs is the standard reference, still cited by museums and dealers alongside the Daumier Register. Prints: the Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art publish impressions online. Books: look second-hand for catalogues of the lithographs.

Notes

The Third-Class Carriage is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His painted clay busts of members of parliament, the Célébrités du Juste Milieu, are in the Musée d'Orsay. His eyesight began to fail around 1865; the Third Republic granted him a pension in 1877.

Story

Daumier's pencil twice brought the police to his door. In 1831 he drew Gargantua, King Louis-Philippe as a giant. He was charged with "inciting to hatred and contempt of the government" and from August 1832 served six months in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie. Two years later, in April 1834, troops putting down an uprising in Paris killed residents of the rue Transnonain, old men, women and children among them. Daumier drew what they left: a body slumped against a bed, a child beneath it, more dead on the floor. The lithograph was made for L'Association mensuelle, a subscription print club raising money for press freedom, and the censors passed it. Then the printseller Aubert put it in his shop window. The authorities ordered every impression they could find confiscated, and the lithographic stone with it. The good impressions that survive are the ones people hid, often folded to do so, and a fine one is now among the most treasured prints of the century. Daumier's old age had a kinder turn. As his eyesight failed he was renting a house at Valmondois. Around 1868 his friend the painter Camille Corot secretly bought it and gave it to him, and Daumier died there in 1879.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Cleveland Museum of Art (Rue Transnonain) ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Bookshop.org ↗AbeBooks ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

1stDibs ↗eBay ↗

See also

John Constable 1776-1837Kathe Kollwitz 1867-1945Ilya Repin 1844-1930Ivan Shishkin 1831-1898Ivan Kramskoi 1837-1887Vasily Vereshchagin 1842-1904Isaac Levitan 1860-1900Vasily Surikov 1848-1916

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