Daumier emerges as an artist of exceptional genius and modernity in this volume.

Daumier Drawings

Arts & Photography

Sonnabend, Martin

Ives, Colta

Stuffmann, Margaret

Drawing

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) is best known as the nimble caricaturist of French politics and the habits of the bourgeoisie. The nearly 4,000 lithographs he created for the Parisian press have long been appreciated as magic windows on the perils and follies of everyday life and continue to be widely admired. However, it is in his rarer and less famous drawings and watercolors, the private work he made for himself and a very limited audience, that Daumier most clearly emerges as an artist of exceptional genius. Indeed, it was on the strength of his skill as a draftsman that Baudelaire declared Daumier the equal of Ingres and Delacroix. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which offered the most extensive display of Daumier's drawings since the Paris retrospectives of 1901 and 1934. Featuring about 150 works from twenty of the world's foremost museums and from private collections, it included casual sketches produced by the artist to vent his restless imagination as well as many of the highly finished watercolors he designed as formal presentations of his art. By combining Daumier's drawings with selected examples of his paintings, prints, and bronzes, this book traces the evolution of the artist's succinct and emphatically expressive style from its roots in the European tradition exemplified by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fragonard to its modern manifestations in the works of Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Beckmann. In the course of his long and productive career Daumier returned again and again to favorite themes, often after considerable lapses of time. Thus the works here are grouped by their subject matter into six sections: studies of individual figures and faces; narrative scenes inspired by history or literature; views of contemporary urban and domestic life; dramatic portrayals of lawyers in court; depictions of street performers; and episodes in the wanderings of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Five essays, in which the exhibition's curators are joined by two other scholars of nineteenth-century art history, investigate particular aspects of Daumier's work as a draftsman: the character of his fluid, energetic style; the complex iconography and structure of his drawings; the essentially sculptural nature of his art; his effective mastery of pose and gesture; and his personal view of the artist's role in society.  [This book was originally published in 1992 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Stuffmann, Margret

Individual Artists

Ives, Colta Feller

This fascinating book, which accompanied a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, sets out to re-appraise the work of 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain and look at it through fresh eyes. It unites in a single volume paintings, drawings and prints from all periods of the artist's life, highlighting not only the well-documented similarities between paintings and related works on paper, but also the essential differences between these different art forms.

Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape

Whiteley, Jon

History & Criticism

Lund Humphries

Claude Lorrain (1604 - 1682) is known as the father pf European landscape painting. His influence has been enormous, not only on the art of his immediate followers but on European landscape painters throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The impact of his art has been felt particularly in Britain, where 18th- and early 19th-century artists, collectors and connoisseurs contributed to a cult of Claude which has left a lasting effect on British attitudes to the countryside. As a result, Claude's art has become very familiar and we have tended to see Claude through his influence. This fascinating new book, which accompanies a major exhibition of Claude's work at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, sets out to re-appraise his work and look at it through fresh eyes. It unites in a single volume paintings, drawings and prints from all periods of the artist's life, highlighting not only the well-documented similarities between paintings and related works on paper, but also the essential differences between these different art forms. The range of works reproduced in this book, alongside its critical scholarly text, make it an essential purchase for all those interested in Claude, the landscape, and European landscape painting in general. It gives new insight into the creative process and achievement of one of the most enchanting of European masters.

Claude Lorrain: An Exhibition of Prints, Drawings and Paintings

Ashmolean Museum

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