Honore Daumier: Subject Matter

"Grand Staircase of the Palace of Justice"
by Honore Daumier

"Honore Daumier brought his great work to the completion before the hocus-pocus of modernism and the exploitation of claptrap had alienated art from humanity. In some respects he was unique among Frenchmen. He hired no models to pose for him. 'The people of Paris going about their business are my models,' he said, and he studied their occupational attitudes; dug into their battered souls; observed the lines and planes that hardships had written in their faces and the sculptural twist of their bodies as they washed clothes or swept the streets. His subject matter was gathered from the universal aspects of French life, and he painted with a depth of feeling conspicuously missing in French art.

For example, let us look at one of his most cherished models, the lawyer. As an usher in the courts, he had watched the lawyers perform, and had said, 'There is nothing in the world more fascinating than the mouth of a lawyer in operation.' He had seen shysters puffing out hypocritical arguments in the defense of crooks and felons, making justice a snide thing; and after recording his observations in caricatures of wax, had hurried to his garret to amplify them in lithography. 

As his art matured, he put the lawyers in his magazine cartoons, and in his independents studies. The lawyer did something to Daumier's soul and he, reciprocating, did something to them, and the interaction, combined with years of technical knowledge, produced the work of art, the created lawyer who is indisputably a Daumier job."

To be continued

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