Daumier, Honoré. (1808–1879)
Une soirée musicale - Grand air italien chanté par un amateur français.
Lithograph on paper as published in the French illustrated magazine, Le Charivari January 5, 1853. 220 x 275 mm. Nice impression of this funny musical scene by the great French caricaturist. Newspaper print on verso as issued. Date in contemporary ink to lower edge, a few light creases, else fine.Le Charivari was started by caricaturist Charles Philipon and his brother-in-law Gabriel Aubert to reduce their financial risk of censorship fines. They also had published the satirical, anti-monarchist, illustrated newspaper La Caricature, which had more pages and was printed on more expensive paper. Le Charivari, published from 1832 to 1937, was widely known for printing caricatures, political cartoons and reviews. After 1835, when the government banned political caricature, Le Charivari began publishing satires of everyday life.
In 1831, Daumier was engaged by Philipon to become a cartoonist for his newly founded journal of political satire, La Caricature. This launched him on a career of forty years as comic artist to the weekly press, during which he drew 3,958 lithographs before the onset of blindness in the 1870s put a stop to his work. The initial target of his attacks was the government of King Louis-Philippe, which he ridiculed with a corrosive wit that brought him to the notice of the press police and earned him a jail term of six months in 1832. He nevertheless continued to draw for La Caricature and for another of Philipon's journals, Le Charivari, developing, in the heat of weekly combat, a graphic style of unsurpassed brilliance in an art that in France had little prestige. When a tightening of censorship in 1835 put an end to La Caricature, Daumier shifted to politically unobjectionable social satire for Philipon's other journal, Le Charivari. In hundreds of lithographs, published serially, two or three a week, he turned a sharp eye on the characteristic look and demeanor of every segment of Parisian society, ranging from the crotchets and timidities of the urban middle class with which he fondly empathized (Les Bons Bourgeois), to the frauds of speculators (Robert Macaire), the pomposities of lawyers (Gens de justice), the self-delusions of artists, the rapacity of landlords, and the vanity of bluestockings. (nga.gov) (411)
Art/Sculpture Opera