Caricaturist Turned Painter

In his own lifetime, Honore Victorin Daumier was known chiefly as a relentless political cartoonist, but a few contemporaries appreciated him for the gifted painter that he was. "Daumier," wrote the poet Baudelaire, "knows all the absurd misery, all the folly, all the pride of the small bourgeois--this type that is at once commonplace and eccentric--for he has lived intimately with them and loves them." Last week the serious side of Honore Daumier was on view at Lon don's Tate Gallery in 231 paintings and drawings, the biggest Daumier show in 60 years. Daumier's reputation as a painter has soared over the past two decades; the Tate exhibition should clinch his position as one of the most original artists of his time.

Daumier was the son of a Marseille glazier who wrote a little poetry on the side and who thought so much of his talent that in 1816 he decided to move himself and his family to Paris. At twelve, the glazier's son became a messenger boy for a process server's office and then a clerk for a bookstore--jobs that opened up to him every corner of Paris. He sketched everything he saw, finally started studying art with an academician whose idea of instruction was to have his pupils copy plaster casts hour after hour. "This is not life," said Daumier, and he struck out on his own.

Louis Philippe as Sargantua. The lithograph was a comparatively new art in those days, but it quickly became Daumier's bread and butter. He began turning out political cartoons for an ardently antiroyalist magazine called La Caricature. One cartoon portrayed King Louis Philippe as Gargantua gobbling up every last sou in France. For such indiscretions Daumier spent six months in prison.

No sooner was he out again than he started producing more cartoons for another magazine. In 1846, at the age of 38, he married a young seamstress and settled down in an apartment on the Quai d'Anjou. There, in a bare attic studio, using crayons until they were so worn that he could no longer hold them, and whistling the latest music-hall tunes, Daumier turned out lithographs of arrogant aristocrats, greedy landlords, sour-faced men and nagging wives, sinister lawyers and pompous judges. In one scene, a judge says to a half-starved prisoner: "So you were hungry; that's no reason for stealing. I'm hungry too--nearly every day. But I don't steal!"

Two Fried Eggs. Daumier made lithographs, 3,958 in all, until he went blind at 65. But all along he was painting, though no more than a handful of his canvases were shown in public before the last year of his life. Compared with the more spectacular romantics, he seemed rough and unfinished. Nor did he understand the work of the new impressionists ("Who on earth forces you to show such horrors?" he asked a gallery owner who was exhibiting work by Monet). He was a superlative draftsman whose brush drew spare and strong, and whose preoccupation was people. His people--often molded like sculpture and bathed in a somber but acid light--picnicked, gossiped, argued in court, rode on buses. But no matter how ordinary their acts, Daumier gave drama and dignity to their lives. He was ruthless in his candor, but his candor was born of concern.

The painter Daumier was a rotund, gentle person who cared far more for others than for himself. "We can console ourselves with our art," he once whispered to a colleague while passing through a slum, "but these creatures, what do they have?" As for himself, he said: "What do I need? Two fried eggs in the morning, in the evening a herring or a cutlet. Add to that a glass of Beaujolais and some tobacco to stuff in my pipe--anything else would merely be extra." There were never any extras for Daumier. A year before he died, at 70, a group of friends, led by Victor Hugo, arranged a show of his paintings. It closed dismally, with a deficit of 4,000 francs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.