The Century illustrated monthly magazine . onder how many,in the course of an hour, may lift the latcheven of an establishment that pretends to nogreat business). What was all this small, soci-able, contentious life but the great Daumierssubject-matter ? He was the painter of the Pa-risian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeoiswas in the air. M. Champfleury has narrated Daumiers hfe,in his lively Httle Histoire de la CaricatureModerne, a record not at all abundant inpersonal detail. The biographer has told hisstory better perhaps in his careful catalogueof the artists productions, the first
The Century illustrated monthly magazine . onder how many,in the course of an hour, may lift the latcheven of an establishment that pretends to nogreat business). What was all this small, soci-able, contentious life but the great Daumierssubject-matter ? He was the painter of the Pa-risian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeoiswas in the air. M. Champfleury has narrated Daumiers hfe,in his lively Httle Histoire de la CaricatureModerne, a record not at all abundant inpersonal detail. The biographer has told hisstory better perhaps in his careful catalogueof the artists productions, the first sketch of 4o6 DAUiMIER, CARICATURIST. which is to be found in LArt for copious list is Daumiers real history; hislife can have been little else than his work. Iread in the interesting pubhcation of M. Grand-Carteret ( Les Moeurs et la Caricature enFrance, 1888 ) that our artist produced nearlyfour thousand lithographs and a thousand draw-ings on wood, up to the time when failure ofeyesight compelled him to rest. This is not the. CLYTEMNESTRA. sort of activity that leaves a man much timefor independent adventures, and Daumier wasessentially of the type, common in France, ofthe specialist so immersed in his specialty thathe can be painted in only one attitude — ageneral circumstance which perhaps helps toaccount for the paucity, in that country, ofbiography, in our English sense of the word,in proportion to the superabundance of criti-cism. Honore Daumier was born at Marseilles onthe 26th of February, 1808, and he died on thenth of the same month, 1879. His main ac-tivity, however, was confined to the earherportion of his life of almost exactly seventy-one years, and I find it aftirmed in Vapereaus Dictionnaire des Contemporains that hebecame completely blind between 1850 andi860. He enjoyed a pension, from the state,of 2400 francs; but what relief from miserycould mitigate a quarter of a century of dark-ness for a man who had looked out at theworld with such vivifyi
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