Honore Daumier: Lithographs and Paintings

"The Third-class Railway Carriage"
by Honore Daumier

"All told, some 4,500 lithographs carry the initials H.D.; prints that have set the high-water mark for all subsequent workers on stone - and you can still buy them for a few dollars. Honore Daumier's oils are few and far between, but intrinsically and in terms of the market, almost beyond price. 

One of the best, 'The Third-class Railway Carriage' at the Metropolitan Museum, and one of several versions of the subject, is about as profound a painting as the world has seen in the last hundred years. It represents his models going about their daily business; three seats in a compartment, with two women in the first, one suckling a baby, the other, very old with a sleeping boy at her side; and in the background rows of passengers, some full-face, some in profile, several in back view. Here are models habitually considered and pondered over, filled with pity and magnanimity, with the human substance poured into them by a great soul; here in plain faces and bodies as solid as clay, we have the story of the dreariness of one aspect of French life, and the portraits of God's creatures fashioned of the stuff that endures forever."

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