Honoré Daumier

Exhibited by Gallery 19C

Material Oil on panel

Dimensions 26 x 30.7 cm (10 1/4 x 12 1/8 in)

Status Vetted

About the Work

Honoré Daumier has always been a challenging artist to categorize in 19th century French painting. His early reputation centered on his cartoons as a satirical newspaper caricaturist, first for the weekly journal La Caricature and later as a visual social commentor for Le Charivari, where his subjects were treated in much in the same spirit as Charles Dickens. His work was admired by Eugène Delacroix and Charles Baudelaire, and he was friends with Jean Baptiste Camile Corot, Charles François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau.

Daumier turned to painting between 1855-1870. At this time, his works in oil took on a different tone from his earlier satirical cartoons. One may speculate that he was influenced by contemporary artists, especially Gustave Courbet and Jean François Millet, because Daumier’s subjects now become primarily drawn from realistic scenes of everyday life -railway travelers, amateur collectors looking at prints, street entertainers, lawyers and in the case of our painting, two beer drinkers seated at a table; one lighting his pipe while the other focuses on reading his newspaper (perhaps here Daumier was secretly giving a nod to his earlier profession).

Our painting originally belonged to Madame Albert Esnault-Pelterie, who in the earlier twentieth-century, assembled a legendary, highly focused collection of paintings and drawings by Daumier, Delacroix, Corot, Millet, and Courbet.

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Provenance

Charles Salomon, by 1878
Mme Albert Esnault-Pelterie, Paris, France, by 1910-at least 1938
Dr Fritz Nathan, Zollikon, Zurich, Switzerland, by 1955
Thence by descent to the present owner
At one time handled by the late dealer Sam Salz, New York, New York.

Literature

A. Alexandre, Honoré Daumier, l'homme et l’oeuvre, Paris, 1888, p. 375.
E. Klossowski, Honoré Daumier, incl. supplement, Munich, 1923, no. 272, p. 111.
J. Fontainas, La Peinture de Daumier. Ars graphica; études et documents, Paris, 1923, pl. 18, illustrated.
E. Fuchs, Der Maler Daumier, incl. supplement, Munich, 1930, no. 35b, illustrated.
B. Fleischmann, Honoré Daumier, Gemälde, Graphik, Vienna 1938 (French edition by Sachs, Maurice), p. XXXVI, pl. 84, illustrated
J. Lassaigne, Daumier, New York and Paris, 1938, p. 42, illustrated.
J. Lassaigne, Formes et Couleurs, vol. III/IV, 1945, p. 381.
P. Courthion, Daumier raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, Vésenaz, P. Cailler, 1945, p. 268, illustrated.
C. Scweicher, Daumier, Paris, Somogy, Ars Mundi, 1953, pl. 8.
G. Besson, Honoré Daumier, Paris, Cercle d'Art, 1959, pl. XLV, illustrated.
G. Besson, Daumier Paintings and Drawings, London, 1961, no. 30, p. 32, pl. 7c, illustrated.
R. Rey, Daumier, Library of Great Painters, New York, 1965, pp. 102-103, illustrated.
K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings, 2 vols., Paris, 1967, I-155, pl. 78.
G. Mandel, Tout l'œuvre peint de Daumier, Paris, 1972, no. 203.
P. Cabanne, Honoré Daumier, Paris, 1999, p. 144, illustrated.