What is Honoré Daumier known for?

 What is Honoré Daumier known for?

Realism in different mode

Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) published one after the other daring impressive lithographs (liographs) in different magazines for a long time and ridiculed the then official class and customs.  He was in his 40s when he began to paint small oil paintings in brown and soft reds with subjects from everyday life or from the literary works of Moliere, La Fontaine and Servette.  In the beginning of the twentieth century, he got recognition among the best oil painters of his time.  Hogarth, Shard and the 17th-century Dutch painters prior to Daumier painted scenes of everyday events and customs in their surroundings with meticulous detail.

    But the originality of Daumier was in the fact that he made his pictures not as an honest realist but as a dreamer idealist. By nature he was a devout poet at heart of exaggeration and if he had received proper education in painting, he could have made powerful pictures of episodes taken from Bible poems and plays. Daumier knew his modest background and was an ardent democrat; Therefore, he made paintings by adopting corresponding themes and notation, such as 'Third Class Box' (Metropolitan, New York), 'The Chess Players' (Peti Paley, Paris), 'The Print Collector' (Esno Peltari Collection, Paris), ' Crispin and Scapin' (Lun), 'Don Quixote and Sancho Panza' (C. Pesson Collection, New York). In the paintings, he transformed the subjects with the aim of making them nutritious for his purpose. He depicted middle-class and lower-class Parisians as transformed into powerful figures or wearing distorted masks. Generally, painters of daily contexts, who try to depict the time and place-determining nuances in the picture, have been completely avoided by Daumier, and have depicted the bodies, facial expressions and actions of men in an exaggerated form, as if For him the subject was merely a pretext to serve its expressive purpose.

This thing becomes clear when we compare Daumier's picture 'Dhoban' (Luvre) with Dega's picture 'Dhobanen'. Dega has realistically depicted the washing shop, the wet clothes hanging in it to dry and the activity of the washerwoman doing the ironing, while Domiya's is the bundle of clothes on the head of the washerman climbing the steps on the banks of the Sen River or something else. It is not known about this and the houses on the banks of the river have all been simplified in a very general way.

Daumier painted scenes from Moliere's plays, one of the most outstanding being 'Drama' (Naia Staatsgalerie, Munich) depicting a solemn scene of a play being enacted on stage through a crowd of onlookers sitting in the courtroom. Has been done with a penchant for exaggeration, Daumier naturally turned to theatrical depictions where everything in life is presented in an exaggerated manner. Like Victor Hugo and Alexander Ghuma, he was fond of simplification and exaggeration. He also painted some of the 'collector'-like happy subjects for home interiors. Invariably, he made a sketch from which what he thought was unnecessary was removed. In this way, by removing the unnecessary and resorting to exaggeration, he used to give stylized and superior form to the general subject.