Honore Daumier: Humble Beginnings

"The Print Collector" by Honore Daumier

"Honore Daumier was born in Marseilles in 1808 and came to Paris as a child when his father, an excellent glazier but a mediocre poet, hoped vaguely to gain recognition in the world of letters. The recognition was denied him and the Daumiers, desperately poor, allowed their son to take his destiny in own hands and make what he could of it. There was no need to lie awake at night worrying about the boy: he was sure of himself from his seventh year and his life, though hard and materially less profitable than a hod carrier's, was artistically rich and satisfactory.

Honore began to draw before he learned the secrets of the streets, and hating formal training, had the best education open to a boy of his resolution - the gutter. He grew up in the streets, and to mitigate the sting of poverty, roamed the Louvre, looking at pictures. In middle-age, a famous man, he made a lithograph of a party of visitors in the big museum of art: two pedagogues shepherding groups of helpless children. One says to the other: 'You take yours on this side, and I'll do the other, and we'll finish the room in a jiffy.'

Nobody told him what pictures to admire. Nobody tried to impress him with a little learning. He was on his own, and naturally, was attracted to the works of art containing something of himself - to Rembrandt who binds together all unfortunate souls and to the sculptures of Michelangelo for there was, as Balzac pointed out, 'much of Michelangelo in the boy.' The art student from the gutter made sketches in emulation of his favorites, and from the sketches, little modelings in clay or wax which hinted of the power to come.

For a time he was an usher at court, which meant that he wore a black gown and conducted idlers to their seats to watch the behavior of the law. Next, he was a bookseller's drudge and after that a professional artist. Before he was twenty he had somehow mastered lithography and had published in this medium a series of pictures which, for draftsmanship and characterization, are unexcelled in French art. His work caught the eye of the editor of a radical sheet, and he joined the staff, at twenty-one, on the promise of unlimited freedom."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Famous Artists and Their Models" by Thomas Cravens.)