5 most important works of Honoré DAUMIER

Honore Daumier (1808-1879) he was a multifaceted artist and one of the rmost prominent and popular representatives of French realism. He was a great caricaturist, as well as a painter, sculptor, and draftsman in whom sarcasm prevailed, criticism and mordacity showing reality from the perspective of denouncing society and present. Daumier, trained in drawing with Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), he always had a great affinity with the working class and the social movements that denounced the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, defending the emancipation of women.

In this lesson of unPROFESOR.com we present you the Daumier's most important works, showing both his facet as a caricaturist and his small paintings, some pictures with enormous expressiveness and strong and energetic line that notably influenced the currents expressionists.

Index

1. Who is the painter Honoré Daumier?
2. Night owls (1847), a highly noted Daumier work
3. Allegory of the Republic (1848)
4. Lawyers (1848)
5. Crispin and Scapino (1860- 1865)
6. Laundress (1863) by Daumier

Born in Marseille, Daumier began his artistic career drawing advertisements and making cartoons for comic magazine the caricature. A work that brought him great fame for his lithographs full of a sharp political satire, even going to jail in 1832 for a caricature of King Louis Philippe I of Orleans, as Gargantua.

Nor was the bourgeoisie spared from being satirized by Daumier, his best-known work being the lithographs published in the newspaper I will charivari. He also highlighted how plaster and bronze sculptor, being highly valued by art galleries.

His work was very prolific and in it he reflects his remarkable talent for drawing, performing about 4,000 lithographs, 300 drawings, and 200 paintings in which he highlights his sharpness and the depth of his criticism. Daumier lived through the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the passage from the triumph of bourgeois liberalism to the restoration of conservatism and the beginning of the Second French Empire (1852-1870).

During all those years, Daumier became chronicler of urban life, reflecting poverty, injustice and social marginalization.

In this oil on cardboard, Daumier represents the figure of the flaneur or walker, a figure glossed by Baudelaire as the person who walks through the city as if it were a landscape. A character born in the atmosphere of exaltation of progress and the metropolitan world of the nineteenth century.

The flaneurs they wandered around the city with the sole purpose of observing and strolling without further purpose, being citizens, observers and critics.

Daumier represents two characters in a night urban frame, without detailing the figures, but offering us the precise features to know their age and social status.

This is one of Daumier's most important works, a allegory of the french republic. It was made by Daumier for a competition organized to celebrate the proclamation of the Second Republic in France. A work in which register changes political cartoonist to realist painter.

For Daumier, the Republic is a strong woman, capable of feeding her children, instruct them and hold the French flag energetically. Thus, he represents her seated, holding tightly to the flag and nursing two children, while a third reads absorbed at the feet of the Republic, under her protection.

In addition to the influence of Miguel Angel by robustness of the figure and the expressiveness and vigor of the drawing, we can also appreciate the accuracy of the stroke typical of his style and a great symbolic and expressive load. A style that greatly influenced Corot and Delacroix, In addition to being a teacher of artists of next generations such as Van Gogh or Picasso.

In the New Regime, the figure of the lawyer gained special prominence., generating much criticism for the arbitrariness of their actions and the abuses of power they carried out protected by their bureaucratic and legal power. Daumier, who did not particularly like lawyers, carried out numerous satires on his performance, leaving us with an incredible sociological study of his time.

In this work, Daumier shows us the figure of two lawyers with a deified appearance and full of cynicism. A work in which Daumier is inspired by masters such as Goyaor Velazquez, in addition to using the chiaroscuro and the shadows in the style of Caravaggio.

Crispin and Scapino is another of Daumier's most important works. And it is that another of the themes that attracted Daumier was the world of the circus and the theater.

In this work, the painter represents two actors performing the work Scapin's Tangles from Moliere. Daumier demonstrates his skill as a draftsman by capturing just the moment and the exaggerated and melodramatic attitude and gestures of the actors.

This painting was a great success, showing the complicity of the characters, something for which he used the games of shadows and the sharpness and precision of the line as a way of showing the picaresque and cunning of Crispin and Scapino.

With A third class carriage (1864), this is one of Daumier's most important works. Both works are part of the portraits of the humble class that Daumier made during the Second Empire as criticism and urban social chronicle.

In this oil on canvas he represents a laundress carrying a laundry basket as he grabs a little girl's hand. The work gives off a clear and intense effort and exhaustion of women in their attempt to climb the stairs, symbol of that desire to survive, to overcome the day to day, loaded with the hard work of him and the maternity. The laundress is a robust and strong woman, a heroine for Daumier, capable of being a woman, an honest worker and mother.

Chiaroscuro is again the technique used by Daumier, showing the figures in shadow and lit from behind by intense light. An image that also inspired Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and other avant-garde artists of the 20th century.

If you want to read more articles similar to Daumier: most important works, we recommend that you enter our category of History.

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• JIMENEZ, Maria Eugenia Gutierrez. The eye that undresses us. Honoré Daumier and the political power of caricature. IC Scientific Journal of Information and Communication, 2015, no 12.
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• RUIZ, Oscar Ortega. Honoré Daumier: the republican laugh. South: Literature Magazine, 2015, no 5, p. 36.