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Daumier was armed with great drawing skills and understanding of character. Caricature was his weapon, not words. He drew sketches in which he impaled
the dignitaries of bourgeois France on his lithographic crayon, writes
B. N. Goswamy
It is not I who am proscribed, it is liberty; it is not I who am exiled, it is France. The words are those of Victor Hugo, the great 19th century French novelist and poet, but they could as easily have belonged to a great contemporary of his—the artist, Honore Daumier. For, in his lifetime, Daumier (1808-1879), too, was harassed and persecuted, even sent to prison, all because he had the courage and the skill to ridicule—through his art—the high and the mighty of his age. France, his country, was going through a series of convulsions in government and society at the time. The Napoleonic era had ended; the return of the Bourbon kings sputtered a little, and that, too, for only a short while; the year 1830 saw a revolution convulse the nation; the colourless Louis Philippe came to power as a ‘citizen king’; and then came the great 1848 ‘Socialist’ upheaval—a revolution that touched off a whole chain in Europe. Once again, France had sneezed, and the rest of Europe had caught a cold, as the saying went. The country had become a ‘crucible of politics and taste’ for an entire continent. And in these stirring but difficult times, which threw up a whole range of doubtful characters, satire began to flourish as never before. Daumier was in so many ways at the centre of it. This extraordinarily gifted man—in a moving tribute, the art critic Robert Hughes wrote, ‘No greater visual satirist ever lived; none, one may be fairly sure, ever will’—did not begin by being an artist. Born to parents with limited talents, and faced at the age of 13 by his father’s breakdown, he worked first as a messenger boy for a legal official; then gained employment as a clerk in a bookseller’s shop. But gradually he turned to art, learning much from a master who was a contemporary of the great David, and having garnered enough ammunition for satire from his exposure to people and things. As someone said, parading before his employer’s window, Daumier had kept seeing all the characters of the comedie humaine—men and women of fashion, intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, the so-called ‘captains of industry’, who were nothing else but swindlers. And, of course, politicians. In that muddled, somewhat bizarre, setting appeared an illustrated newspaper, Le Charivari, which, among other things, set about poking fun at some of these types and characters. To deflate and to correct seemed to be the aim. The moment was ripe, and the cause just. And into that situation walked in Daumier, armed with great drawing skills and understanding of character. Caricature was his weapon, not words. Day after day, he drew for the paper, his sketches, those ‘distillations of vengeance’ as they have been called, in which he impaled the dignitaries of bourgeois France on his lithographic crayon. He spared no one, gave no quarter to anyone or anything. Among his most famous caricatures—which also became a cause celebre—was that of the king, Louis Philippe, whose swollen and knobbly face he had earlier presented in the shape of a pear. In this sketch, which he titled Gargantua—after the great satirist Rabelais’ famous character with a giant appetite—he rendered the king perched, with his enormous frame, on a commode in the heart of Paris, in the Place de la Concorde in fact. Close to his feet are huddled together the low and the wretched, watching as the king is being fed—basketfuls rising up to his mouth along a whole conveyer-belt-like plank—while from underneath his seat on the commode keep emerging documents, apparently referring to illegal largesse and concessions and the like, eagerly collected by the well-fed and the well-clad. The import was obvious, the drawing brilliant, the bite merciless. Daumier’s visual assaults had been tolerated for some time, but now there was real trouble for him. He was hauled up, this ‘Michelangelo of caricature’, as the poet Baudelaire called him, and, apart from being heavily fined, thrown into prison for six months. For some time political cartoons were banned in France. However, cartoons and caricatures with a social content, continued to be made and published. And Daumier kept soldiering on. There were many targets in sight, none more inviting than the corrupt world of law. It was teeming with ‘pompous judges, robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, frightened clients, stone-faced ushers, and bewildered accused’. The law was no longer a means towards fairness or justice but had turned into ‘an enormous and self-feeding machine, abstract and inhuman.’ Daumier knew this world well from his own experience and began to rail against it in caricature after caricature. It was as if he could not, like Hamlet, bear ‘the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, `85 the law’s delay, the insolence of office’. There is such venom in his work, but also such wit. In so many ways, the work is uplifting. Anyone who knows Daumier’s prodigious work also knows that he was, besides being a great caricaturist, a serious painter whom many—including Manet and Degas and Toulous-Lautrec—regarded as one of the pioneers of modern art. But of that another time, perhaps. Meanwhile, one needs to turn one’s attention briefly to his moving studies of the common man, and of what was happening right under his own nose: in the railway carriage, in the bar, the cellar, the butcher’s shop, the laundry next-door. Like Dickens, as has been said, ‘Daumier worked out of immersion in the muck and detail of life as it was lived.’ And turned out some remarkable work: humane and engaging at the same time, capable of transcending its own time and place. Like his study after study of travellers in a third class railway carriage.
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