T\ /T . "XT Z mm- ¦¦¦¦¦- **f*"V V] ' '^I'-l \"S"r' i 1\ \J \j V *3ii: SSS ^aSKS?.: SSSSSU! YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gift of Duncan Phillips Honore Daumier APFRECIA TIO^(S OF HIS LIF6 AND WO<%KS The 'Phillips Publications D^fumber Two E. P. Dutton IS Company New York ig22 Copyright, 1922, by E. P. Dutton & Company of New Tork City Printing House of William Edwin Rudge, New Tork City CONTEJ^TS PAGE Announcement 3 Phillips Publications i i Article ' 1 3 By Duncan Phillips Article 3 7 By Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. Article 49 By Guy Pene du Bois Article 5 3 By Mahonri Young Bibliography 59 [v] LIST OF ILLUSTTtATIOS^S flonore Daumier photograph Portrait of Daumier as a Young Man By Corot, 1836. Petit Palais, Paris Le Peintre devant son tableau (25 x 30 cm.) La Blanchisseuse (34 x 49 cm.) Bureau Collection, Paris La Blanchisseuse (32 x 45 cm.) Collection Gallimard, Paris La Republique 1848. Leinwand (60 x J 3 cm.) Collection Moreau-N elaton, Louvre, Paris Le Coup de vent, ou Les Fugitifs (31 x 16 cm.) Collection Mme. Esnault-Pelterie, Paris Les Emigrants, ou Les Fugitifs (67 x 38 cm.) Collection Sarlin, Paris Don Quixote Metropolitan Museum, New York Eccehomo, ou Nous voulons Barrabas (12J x 160 cm.) Collection Osthaus, Hagen Le Meunier, son Fils et son Ane Trois Avocats Phillips Collection [vii] LIST OF ILLUSTTtATIOP^S Mere et Enfant Phillips Collection Le Repos des Saltimbanques (62 x 54 cm.) Collection Joubert, Paris Hercule defoire (32 x 25 cm.) Saltimbancjues Scene de la Revolution Le Malade imaginaire (38 x 2/ cm.) Collection Mme. Esnault Pelterie, Paris La Lecture du manuscrit (30 x 21 cm. ) Pay sans dinant Le Wagon de je Classe Collection de M. Paul Gallimard Les Baigneurs Don Quixote Caricatures in Painted Clay Les Fugitifs de la sages se Bronze. Courtesy of Knoedler & Co. Au Theatre francais Aquarell. (34 x 2/ cm.) [ viii ] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS L"Arrivee du train Phillips Collection Un Wagon de troisieme classe (31 x 21.^ cm.) Aquarell, Durand Ruel Dans r atelier d'un artiste Aquarell (30 x 32 cm.) South Kensington Museum UAmateur Aquarell. (35 x 44 cm.) La Chanson a boire Aquarell. (36 x 26 cm.) Le Defenseur (2p x ip cm.) Water color. Col. Am. A. Clark, New York Apres r audience Aquarell. (35 x 28 cm.) Mme. Esnault Pelterie, Paris Les Jaseurs Ulvresse de Silene Don Quixote Pen and Ink Drawing DrawingWoodcuts Salon 1850-51. Musee de Calais Collection Arthur B. Davies [ix] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Une Promenade sur la rive de la Seine a Pepoque de la canicule Dans la maison de retraite a deux heures du soir Le Theatre Woodcut Les Patrons Woodcut Jules Favre Jour de naissance de Papa Le Bain chaud Lithograph Wici vous pouvez voir la Tour de St. Jacques Un Jour de Revue Ratapoil et son etat major. "Vive I'Empereur.'" Aux Champs- Ely sees De trois heures a six heures, grande exposition des nouveaux jupons-ballons [*] A NNOUNCSMENT A NNO UNC8MENJ The Phillips Memorial Gallery is now open to the public at 1 600 Twenty-first Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. This is to be the home of the collection for several years while plans for the permanent building are in a formative and plastic state. Although it is too soon to make definite announcements of all that we in tend to do, since force of circumstances or changed conditions may cause our best laid plans to be altered or amended, never theless the time is ripe for telling about the treasures and for creating an interest in the special and novel character of the Phillips Memorial. It is to be a home for the fine arts and a home for all those who love art and go to it for solace and spiritual refreshment. We wish therefore to create an atmosphere which is attractive and intimate rather than grandiose and institutional ; where visitors will feel inclined to linger and to which they will wish to return again and again for a special sort of pleasure or for special study. The ultimate building must not be large, no matter to what size the collection may grow. Our idea is not to show all of our treasures at once, but in ever varied and purposeful exhibi tions, arranging the collection in units which would be frequently changed so that the walls of the various rooms would undergo interesting transformations. No crowding of the walls nor dis- [3] A NNO UNCeME^T figuring additions to the building as the collections grow can ever be permitted to destroy the harmony of our rooms and the essen tially domestic character of the architecture as a whole. In the fireproof storage vaults light and air will be supplied and the paintings hung on sliding screens so that they can be at all times available to the visitors. These storage vaults should be made to communicate with the auditorium which we propose to have for plays, concerts and lectures, and with the rooms for special study so that the lecturers and the students may avail themselves of the actual works of art and not have to resort to lantern slides and photographs. We intend to have an art library containing espe cially books on the painters represented in the collection, also portfolios of prints and of original drawings. It is not our present intention to conduct an art school in the commonly accepted sense of the word. There may be studios in the building. We propose that the architecture shall be of some domestic type combining sensuous and subtle beauty with simplicity and quiet charm — some such low and rambling type, adaptable to sky-lit galleries, as the Italian Villa or our own Southern Colonial manor house. We hope for a site commanding a view of the beautiful city of Washington, for wooded grounds laid out with terraces and gardens modified like the building itself, if Italian, to conform with our national [4] A NNOUNCCMENT character and appropriate not only to the architecture but to the local conditions of topography and climate. It is proposed that each room in the building shall be regarded as an assthetic unit, the decorative accessories changed with the changes in the exhibitions. Occasionally rooms will be devoted to the display of the best works by selected artists, rooms which will represent them from every aspect of their character and genius, and to which their admirers will wish to make pilgrimages to re new their interest and to refresh their faith. Occasionally rooms will be given educational intention. The origin and growth of certain assthetic tendencies will be traced back to the early periods of art's history. The collection is to be devoted essentially to the art of our own time, but works of any period, no matter how re mote, may be purchased or borrowed for educational purposes. In this we can show the artist's evolving and revolving interests and aptitudes. Groups of works by artists of similar temperaments and of related aims would have special appeal for kindred spirits and would help to clarify for students certain significant aspects of the creative impulse through the ages. The exhibition units will be composed not only of groups of related artists showing similar training and intention, but also of other groups teaching by means of contrasted merits that in the house of art there are many man- [5] a nnouns£Me:KE sions. It will be interesting to present contrasts of similar subjects treated at different times in different manners, thus teaching history and art simultaneously, to their mutual advantage. Besides the re arrangement and alternating reviews of the permanent collections in the various rooms, there will be a long gallery devoted to all kinds of exhibitions of contemporary art. Our most enthusiastic purpose will be to reveal the richness of the art created in our United States, to stimulate our native artists and afford them inspiration. In all the rooms the setting will be carefully planned and executed with the object of enhancing the effect of the paintings, of em phasizing their essential character and of producing a sympathetic background and a perfect ensemble. For instance, in the Twacht- man room, those who know the marvelous nuances of color, opalescent and phosphorescent, in the works of this great master will be delighted to find these subtle felicities echoed in the back ground in choice bits of Chinese pottery, Persian lustre ware or Greek glass. To complete the ensemble of the room, imagine a black carpet and a wall like that in our present gallery, where a gray, transparent mesh hangs over the plaster, which is toned a delicate apricot. Only time can tell whether our funds will be sufficient to purchase antique potteries and porcelain, bronzes and ivories, carved furniture, tapestry, stained glass. Our modern sculp- [6] A NNOUNC6MENT tors however, are quite as distinguished as our painters and worthy of the same support and faith, and as for our potters and goldsmiths, our craftsmen of all kinds, if they are yet inferior to the men of the earlier dynasties of the Orient or of the middle age of Europe, it is only a question of relative quality. By our encouragement of native and contemporary work we can bring about another era of loving and inspired handicraft which will further glorify the meaning of common things. It will not be our intention to compete with the great museums in assembling obj ects of historic interest nor to have every phase and period in the history of fine and applied art represented with examples. We must specialize in painting, more particularly in modern painting, and it will be our pleasure to show how our American artists maintain their equality with, if not indeed their superiority to, their more famous foreign contempo raries. In order to make better known throughout the world the living American artists whose work we believe to be of enduring worth, we propose to inaugurate the policy of devoting each year to a foreign or American gallery the work of an American artist who had not hitherto been represented in that collection. We are making no effort as yet to raise sums of money through benefactions from wealthy patrons — to which course we would turn only in case we later decided to enlarge the educational scope [7] A NNO UNCSMENJ of the gallery and employ a staff of resident workers and specialists. Such a change of policy would bring us into competition with the museums of the country which at present we regard with respect from the distance that separates the private dwelling house from the institution of learning. Of course we mean to afford ample oppor tunities for study. Our lectures will not be comic monologues, nor our concerts, jazz, nor our library shelves devoted to magazines on the movies. Nevertheless we wish to create an atmosphere of cul ture in which people will feel mentally stimulated with a desire for knowledge but one in which there is no air of academic wisdom and formality. In other words we wish to popularize what is best in art by the attractiveness of our methods of presentation without making concessions to the public in matters of taste or in the standards set for works of art endorsed by the gallery. If we can make our visitors feel at home in the midst of beautiful things and subconsciously stimu lated while consciously rested and refreshed, we shall feel that they will eventually absorb the point of view of our artists and remain thereafter on the same assthetic levels. We believe that it is never right to make art easy and popular at the risk of making it commer cial and indolently conventional. If a renaissance of art is to come in our time it must come not from the ever devoted few but from the awakened interest and enlightened patronage of the many. Our [8] A NNO UNC6MENJ hope, therefore, is that by bringing art to the people in the most attractive way without lowering our standards we may relate beauty to their lives for their inspiration and solace without relinquishing our duty of guiding them to the heights of art and of keeping the fires burning on our own altars. We are conscious of a desire to demonstrate that what we are doing others can do, and that similar Memorial Galleries can be launched wherever there is a wish and a need for them. We would be glad if our building could be ultimately made a memorial com posed of memorials; in other words, of rooms or exhibition units dedicated to the memory of the beloved dead. We shall specialize in modern painting. Our inspired predecessor, Mr. Freer, special ized in Chinese kakemonos. The next Memorial Gallery might specialize in Italian primitives, or in Colonial furniture, or in Flemish tapestries, or in Gothic glass. If our plan is worthy of our effort it will be as a beacon light for others. It is practical and in pursuit of two definite democratic ideals — the ideal of art and the ideal of service. Although we are dreaming already of the remote future and planning for posterity, yet we welcome interest in our modest beginnings and we invite all who care to come to the two small rooms which must constitute for the present the home of the Phil lips Memorial Art Gallery. [9] « TH6 PHILLIPS PUBLIC A TIO^S " We plan to take the Public into our confidence at the outset of our enterprise and to send the preceding announcement far and wide. As the exhibition units become ready for presentation to the Public we shall welcome dignified publicity. Throughout the formative period in the life of the Phillips Memorial we wish to proclaim its often unprecedented purposes and to cultivate the soil of public opinion. Thus we hope to stimulate a demand for what we can supply. The work of criticism and commentary, can and must accompany and even anticipate our exhibitions. Just as in our exhibitions we shall show American painting and European painting side by side, instead of exhibiting our native work separately as if it were a by-product, so we propose to publish two series of books on Art in which American painting will be re garded as part of the main channel of all artistic progress. First there will be a series of monographs on great artists of the past represented in the Phillips Memorial collection. The text will be written by various critics of established reputation on subjects which make to them a special appeal. Cooperating with Duncan Phillips in the preparation of these papers will be such distinguished authors and artists as Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. Royal Cortissoz Guy Pene du Bois Mahonri Young and others. ["] " THE PHILLIPS PUBLICATION^" These numbered monographs will offer symposia of appreciation, compact information and many illustrations (the Weir book will have 32 illustrations; the Daumier 48), relating to the careers of great artists whose lives are finished and whose work thereafter can be completely considered in successive stages of development and in every medium through which they have expressed themselves. In our second series of art books we shall dare to declare our faith in and our admiration for the work of some living painters and we hope to help them win the fame, esteem, and influence they deserve during their lives, instead of discreetly waiting until after they are gone for time to appraise their achievement. This second series will contain a number of short essays by Duncan Phillips on the art of painters living and dead, foreign and American, thus affording a variety of interest and a contrast of artistic temperaments and purposes. The illustrations will be confined to reproductions of paintings in the Phillips Memorial collection. These half-tone prints, including some in color, will be published from our negatives, separate from the books, on sheets or cards of several sizes, to be sold at a low cost for the special benefit of artists and students of art. There will also be reprints in pamphlet form of the essays in both series of books especially printed for the use of artists and students. Lantern slides will be furnished to lecturers on application. [12] /IONIZE DAUMIER 4] APPRECIA TIONS making the world laugh, Daumier saw this truth and ^insisted that we should see it. Shakespeare, who conceived the character of the heroic Fool in Lear, diverting his royal master's tormented mind from its agonies by his antics, would have recognized in Daumier a passionate sympathy like his own for the poor chap who must jest though his health is spent and though his heart is broken. Our artist's personal tragedy is delicately suggested, his own subjection to caricatures, his impending need at the time to return to it since no one would buy his serious paintings. I do not mean to say that Daumier was ever in any sense a mere comedian, for I think I have made it sufficiently clear that in his caricatures he was a per son of national power and importance and that he exulted in the exercise of his humorous faculties, putting much of his art into it as well. But the point of view of the artist was Daumier's natural > angle of vision and the fact that this point of view had to be sup pressed and that of the journalist substituted, this is a real tragedy and adds a poignant personal note to his paintings of professional entertainers who have to be funny because the world wills it and not because they are so inclined. It would be difficult to find a more haunting picture than that of the tired mountebank, resting behind the scenes. His gymnasts, wrestlers and boxers, for all their big muscles, are weary, body and soul. The choice of such [>5] jHONQRE DAUMIER^ themes was unprecedented. Daumier was one of the pioneers in depicting the gay and debonair heedlessness of consequences which charms us in the lives of gypsies and vagabonds, strolling players and street musicians, poets and artists who live gayly in garrets, wondering where the next meal is coming from, laughing and singing in the teeth of fate. Every adversity they turn into adven ture to be met with becoming bravado. Our grim and sordid old world is their playground. The theme is as old as the troubadours and Francois Villon. It lived again in Murger's Vie de Boheme, in Stevenson's Providence and the Guitar, in Locke's Beloved Vagabond, in Synge's Tramp in the Shadow of the Glen. Daumier saw the glamour, but being a realist saw also the tragedy. In one memorable painting fugitives are seen in fantastic silhouette against a fierce, lurid sunset sky as they hurry down a winding trail in a wild country, lashed by the wind, pursued by enemies, seeking escape, "anywhere, anywhere, out of the world." We recall Bret Harte's immortal tale, The Outcasts of Poker Flat. In his paintings Daumier was often a dramatist as well as a , painter, but he was too much of an artist as well as too much of a humorist to ever paint melodrama or mere burlesque. He had caused so many sensations with his caricatures that he was cured in advance of any desire he might have have had to paint sensa- [26] APFRECIA TIONS tional canvases for the Salon. He had told so many grim and funny stories and preached so many sermons showing the horrible ex ample and made so many grotesque images to lampoon the lamen table specimens of the human race that there was no danger of his deliberately diluting the pure aesthetic purpose which he cher ished for his paintings with any such irrelevance as an infusion of the over-emphatic satire of his journalist days. This is something that Daumier's imitators would do well to understand. What they stupidly imitate in their paintings is the mere journalese of the master's caricatures, not the art that is in them and not the ancient and universal language of pure plastic beauty which he used in his paintings. To be sure he aspired to interpret modernity, but always through art which is ageless. Subjects drawn from the life of Paris, its river banks, its streets, its station waiting-rooms and railroad compartments, its theatres and other places of amuse ment, where plebeian types congregate and reveal themselves so clearly — these subjects were dignified in Daumier's paintings by his unfailing respect for his aesthetic medium and by the princi ples of restraint and harmony which give to the true artist's obser vations of character some quality or other of beauty. Millet's attitude was much the same. What Millet did for the French peasant, Daumier did for the bourgeois of Paris. Both men use [27] flONORE DAUMIER^ individuals as representative of classes and classes as expressions of ideas and ideas as the proper material for the painter in giving to particular aspects of the spectacle of human life some general and universal significance. This quality of observation in Daumier entitles him to higher rank as an artist than belongs to satirists such as Goya and Hogarth, who resemble him in many ways, chiefly in that they are all gifted with the flair for beautiful paint. But Goya's satire was a matter of satanic hate and morbid revery and Hogarth's of didactic discourse on the frailties of human nature, whereas Daumier, like Balzac, was conscious always of having to do with the epic of facts and with the beauty of truth, with some meaning perhaps which may become apparent, some gestures which may express states of soul if we study with suffi cient sympathy the endless procession of life wherever we see it passing. Daumier, through his window, could see a splendid woman of the people bathing her man-child and her household linen in the river, and respectfully he watched her as she managed somehow to carry the bundle of wash while assisting her small son to climb the steep steps, one by one. Her strength, her ade quacy for her task, all are revealed in the silhouette of her shoul ders and arms against the white light shed on the river and on the row of vivid white tenements of the opposite shore. No sensa- [28] APPRECIA TIONS tionalism and no sentimentality here, only the beauty of truth trained to seek and find for painting what is both picturesque and emotionally significant — in line, in light, in color, and most of all in form. When he painted a group of men singing in lusty chorus, watching their leader, the rollicking mirth of "close harmony" in their eyes, or else a party of hunters, thawing out with the help of pipe and bowl before a blazing fire, a faithful old hound in their midst, sharing the good cheer and delicious relaxation of the moment, Daumier was no longer a caricaturist looking for some thing to cover with ridicule but the artist citing two instances in which that blessed boon, good fellowship, may be sensed in all its heart- warming splendor. Then there are the paintings of artist life, and of that world where in studios pictures are born and where in galleries amateurs congregate. These Daumiers are per haps the least important but they are the most personal of all. In them our artist pays a tribute of genuine sentiment and affection to that world to which he belonged but from which the exi gencies of his career estranged him. All his life Daumier drew pictures which were successful exactly in proportion to their facility of comprehension by the public, but when his chance came to paint he painted for himself and for those rare individuals who care for aesthetic values. His heart went out with special [29] /IONIZE DAUMIER^ affection to the patron of art and the friend of artists who helps the lonely creator in spite of the "world and his wife," and in spite of the dogmatism and stupidity of those in authority over him in his own profession. I love Daumier's water color of the Collector, alone with his treasures, lounging in his slippers and dressing gown in the depths of an easy chair. He contemplates in contentment these spoils of the spirit of extraordinary men and he dreams per haps of how he can communicate to the many who "have eyes and see not" the ability to appreciate the beautiful, to the end that artists may not be without reward in their own day and with out honor in their own country. Many men of special gifts were contained in Daumier. He was a caricaturist but he was just as much a mystic. He was at heart a romantic poet and he was actually a realistic painter. He was a patriot and therefore a propagandist, but he was also an artist and a technical experimenter far in advance of his age. He was cele brated chiefly for his scathing satire, but the works by which he most wished to be remembered were small, quiet canvases in which he revealed to kindred spirits his love and reverence for spiritual things. Few people know him as the painter of The Good Samaritan, nor have I ever seen this painting, yet I know I would take off my hat to it as to the work of the real Daumier. [3o] APPRECIA TIONS Perhaps the most significant subject he ever undertook was Christ Mocked. The head of the Saviour is seen in silhouette above the howling, gesticulating mob, very pale, showing a soul very sensi tive to all these insults and yet proud and calm and patient, victori ous over the torments of the hour. Here Daumier expressed: his inmost soul's protest against the mean business of mockery in which, because of his aptitude for seeing the ludicrous side of everything, he himself had been so much employed. Here he appealed to his race and fellow countrymen, begging them not i to mock so much, to judge less harshly when they cannot see. ^ Daumier had been a fighter but he had always played fair and had , fought for the sake of an ideal. He had exposed base passions con scientiously but he had a repulsion for vice and avoided unneces sary indecency. In this he differs from Rabelais with whom he has been compared. Of his four thousand cartoons, there is not one that is unclean, an amazing record for a French humourist. Daumier's individuality was so marked, his absorption in novel subjects and great emotions so unmistakable that Mr. W. C. Brownell would not have accepted him as a representative French artist. That fine critic has convinced us that "French art does not contain enough personal flavour to escape conventionality. To be sure exceptional personalities come to the surface and emerge from [3i] HON9RE DAUMIER^ the mass to which culture gives its conventional uniformity. But these are the men of genius. The fact remains that mind is what counts in French art — not emotion. When the French enter the realm of sentiment they are in danger of becoming either fantastic or conventional. Their technic itself is sapient rather than sensu ous. The divinity which presides over every aesthetic shrine is Taste. Naturally the rule of taste results in rigid standards follow ing the tyranny of the mode. Nowhere is fashion so exacting. Hence the development of 'Schools,' the erection of methods into systems." We are reminded of Athenian culture but the critic remarks that the French have the AtheniarTsanity but not the serenity nor the spirituality of the antique world. "Agitated mind counts with them more than tranquil emotion." Their philosophy intrudes. Thus Millet's sentiment is mentally preoccupied by his pervasive interest in the French peasant. And if Brownell had chosen to bring Daumier into the discussion, he might have said that he also was too emotional to be a representative French artist and too much preoccupied (with his street types), too conscious of their background, in a word, too romantic, to be of the true classic breed. Throughout Mr. Brownell's masterly analysis of French Traits, the name of Daumier is not once mentioned, and only a passing [32] APPRECIA TIONS reference to him is made in the earlier volume "French Art." This seems to me most strange, for I recognize in Daumier the French ae§theiic„^enius, not at its most ordinary level, but at its best. Even with Daumier, mind counted more than sentiment, and to be precise, such emotion as he displayed in his art was philo sophical and humane rather than poetic. Of course his early adop tion of lithography as a profession and his long continued career as a cartoonist left little time for the dreams and moods required by the poet. But this was not altogether a compulsion by circum stance. It was essentially his own choice. The caricaturist's habit of mind more or less clung to him when he later attempted flights of pure fancy, and his symbolism and his sentiment were accented with curiously fantastic emphasis. I have already stressed his philosophical solicitude. And objectivejpity it was, whereas ( Rembrandt's was subjective. I have noted his concern for form, i for structure, for symmetry, his rather restrained palette. All these qualities are described as truly French in Brownell's analysis. But Daumier of course was one of the "exceptional geniuses." He was certainly not consistently French to the extent of being like the lesser men, conventional, restrained, elegant and correct. He represents the classic virtues of French art at their crest when conventions can at last be overturned and new standards, new [33] J^ONQRE DAUMIER^ methods, a new viewpoint, established on the old foundations. \ His function in the history of modern art was to discover the \romance of reality, to fuse form and color, style and character, x to make men and women out of modernity instead of lay figures 1 out of mythology serve as symbols of universal significance. Such artists as Meunier, Degas, Rodin, Forain, Carriere, Picasso and Cezanne, have at different times and indifferent manners, followed where he led, but they have seldom proved worthy of his inspira tion. Behind the complex nineteenth century satire and its roman tic ardours, and behind the thoroughly modern philosophical realism in Daumier was the classic spirit, not only sane, but serene in spite of its emotions, and spiritual in spite of its skepticism, seek ing to symbolize with monumental, elemental forms and grandiose contours the significance of human life. It was his French logic derived from classic sources which made him the first painter to depict the lives of the poor on the streets of Paris and, through them, to suggest the essential meaning of everything. For is it not logical that a modern artist should interpret his own world and time, that he should use his own eyes to observe life at first hand, that he should prefer street types, unconscious of being observed and of a simple class whose gestures are unrestrained, to self-conscious studio models? And is it not logical that an artist [34] APPRECIA TIONS should learn that first lesson of art which teaches a man to find out what he is and what he can do best, and admonishes him to pursue that course whether it takes him over some old trail or impels him to blaze a new one ? After all, his fine logic makes Daumier both French and Classic in spite of his passionate ro manticism. In conclusion I wish merely to express once more the hope that the dead are aware of what we think of them. It would be comforting to feel that Daumier, that great, good man, realizes how today we crown him a veritable king of art. He possessed in abundance just those qualities we prize most in an artist. His disciples are the most distinguished draftsmen, painters and sculp tors of our day, and those who show his influence, in one way or another, are too numerous to mention. However much he may seem to us the very pinnacle of French genius, yet his gifts are of a kind which we may all claim, for he conferred upon the world a language which is, in the most profound sense, our universal heritage. [35] flONpRE DAUMIER^ 'By Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. WHEN Charles Daubigny first saw the frescoes of Raphael he exclaimed — "It's Daumier." Offhand the paradox was absurd, for what likeness could there be betwixt the serene urbanity of the creator of the School of Athens and the drastic pungency of the creator of Les Avocats? But the analogies which come uncalled to a sincere and simple spirit like Daubigny's are always right, and never negligible. Daubigny hit with great pre cision the psychological bond between two great artists, neither of whom depended much on immediate transcription from nature, both of whom thought a composition through to completeness of the mental picture before beginning to work. This lucid mental preparation is really more important in the work of Daumier than the evident power and only apparent spontaneity of his powerful stroke. Here there has been grave misunderstanding. People, and par ticularly painters, imagine in Daumier a fury of creation before the object, imagine some inner similarity between his sketches and those which Rodin flung off so impetuously or those paint ings which Van Gogh beat out in a kind of anguish. As a matter of record, Daumier almost never drew from nature at all, and [37] JJONORE DAUMIER never composed even the slightest design for the press without a period of reflection. His art is wholly an art of second thought, and really much nearer to that of Raphael than to that of the modern Expressionists who without understanding either his mind or his methods naturally seek the sanction of his great name. Daumier's habit was to make the most searching observations fromnature, but without chalk or sketch-book in hand. He stalked his game assiduously — the tricky lawyer, the flirtatious wife, the ridiculous husband, the barnstorming actor, the stupid monarch — the whole human comedy of his time, but the mental record was all that he needed. These memories were turned over until they reshaped themselves under some leading idea, and the actual work was generally not undertaken until the idea and the accompany ing images had reached a kind of bursting point. In short, instead of beginning with an overpowering emotion, Daumier reaches it by way of reflection. The more the idea becomes clarified, the greater intensity it gains. It finally emerges hot and vibrant with a ruddy cast of thought. Indeed Daumier is perhaps the best pos sible example to show that the passion which is available for great art is not immediate passion, which is transitory and really weak, but passion which has drawn abiding warmth and energy from the intellectual fires. [38] APPRECIA TIONS Daumier's method of working from visual memories rather than from nature was that of two friends and contemporaries, the witty caricaturist and social chronicler, Constantin Guys; and the creator of the epic of toil, Jean Francois Millet. A method which is good enough to produce both the featherlight crispness and spontaneity of Guys and the grave and noble poetry of Millet cer tainly is a flexible one and not lightly to be disregarded by the artist. To repeat, the daemonic energy of Daumier's workman ship, the writhing of a coarse line, the just impact of a blob of black, the impetuous jab of the scraper on the lithographic stone are all premeditated, not necessarily in consciousness, but pre meditated all the same, and every purposeful smudge of his crayon is as much mixed with brains as were Sir Joshua's colors. Here is the explanation of the proverbial dilatoriness of Daumier . It really meant time to think things out, or perhaps more cor rectly to let them think themselves out. He knew the value of his foible, telling the sensitive poet, Theodore de Banville :"I work from morning to night because I must, but at bottom I am lazier than a thousand dormice. And when I can get out of the daily toil to which I am condemned, then my laziness suggests to me the most astounding inventions." Daumier's few paintings are the precious record of such moments of creative laziness. You will [ 39 ] /ions re DAUMIE\j have to go to the triangular coves of the Sistine Chapel to find any thing more astounding, whether as impressive mass or as intense and sombre sentiment, than, for example the little painting of a mother and child in the John G. Johnson collection. And since this rich and noble melancholy underlies even the most irresistibly funny sheets of Daumier, so that, observing them, a philosopher would, while shaking with laughter, be inclined also to weep for his fellow men, it is pleasant to learn from the invaluable sketch of Banville, how Daumier worked as he achieved his most savage inventions. As he manipulated the incredibly unhandy butts of chalk, which as a prudent obstacle to mere improvisation he pre ferred to better tools, he usually hummed a comic song. The whole passage in which Banville describes Daumier's way of working is enlightening: "He always drew with the debris of the same old crayons, mak ing up his mind to remould them only when he couldn't do other wise, but more often bringing back to life despite themselves the chalk-ends which could no longer even be cut, with which one must manage, finding an angle which suited the feverish caprice of the ready hand, an edge a thousand times more varied and intel ligent than the stupid and perfect point made by the penknife, which breaks or crumbles in the pressure of designing. I would [4o] APPRECIA TIONS gladly say that to this habit of using these shreds, scraps and end's of crayon, which cried out to be spared and never were, that Daumier owed something of the breadth and audacity of his draw ing, in which the coarse and living outline is of the same stuff as the shadows and hatchings — did I not know that such results are not explained by such little causes." All the same the picture of Daumier at work is a real parable. In such fashion as he treated the odds and ends of his working tools, he treated the inchoate spectacle of life as the outer eye sees iL The world of mean ambition, political and legal hypocrisy, pedantic pretensions, futile miseries, and as fruitless joys, became something other as his mind grasped the shards and indications and forced them to work. Mean and trivial mat erial took on some thing of the eager rnagnanimky_onii^5wn.mind (for a tenacious satirist was never more free from mere spleen or from personal vanity) andj^sJtapjxLilselfljLriJ^ and per manence. Charles Daubigny was almost obviously right when he grasped the common act of mental transformation and enhance ment which makes both a lithograph by Daumier and a fresco by Raphael at once the most unlike anything that any ordinary person can see and as well the most real thing conceivable. It was a minor but a very real service of Daumier to dissipate [4i] /IONS RE DALJMIER^ the prevailing academic confusion between artistic greatness and mere monumental bigness, in the physical sense. It was the con stant insistence of his early admirers that he, an illustrator, was as great as the greatest, that made men look beyond dimensions to the size and scale of the creative thought. Of course it was a lesson that might as easily have been read from the prints of Rem brandt or the pastels of Millet. The modern schools sadly misread the lesson when they assume that just because a thing is small, slight and ultra-emphatic it is great. The greatness, of course, is in the mind of the artist, and it becomes beauty where he sets it down, our task being merely, as Delacroix writes, "to find beauty where the artist puts it." The maxim needs only the proviso that we are free to believe the artist or not when he insists he is putting beauty about. We shall evidently not find beauty where the artist has put something else. I think that the critics who early discovered the energetic and manly beauty of the designs of Daumier rendered an incomparable service to modern art. Chief among these critics was Charles Baudelaire, who with all his tinge of degeneracy, was unquestionably the finest critical intelligence on matters of art that France produced in the late romantic period. I can imagine no prouder qualification for a journalist critic than to have written in 1 845, as Baudelaire does simply by the way, on the drawing [42] APPRECIATIONS of Delacroix, Daumier and Ingres. Baudelaire objects to the com mon talk of the studios that Delacroix drew badly: "We know only two men at Paris who draw as well as M . Dela croix, one in a similar, one in a contrary manner. One is M. Daumier, the caricaturist; the other M. Ingres, the great painter, the wily adorer of Raphael. Here surely is something to astound the friends and the enemies, the partisans and the antagonists. But with a quiet and studious attention, everyone will see that these three kinds of drawing have this in common, that they ren der perfectly the aspect of nature which they wish to render, and that they say just what they mean to say. Daumier draws perhaps better than Delacroix, if one prefers the normal and wholesome qualities, to the strange and astonishing qualities of a great genius whose genius is a kind of malady; M. Ingres, so enamored of detail, draws better perhaps than both others, if one prefers laborious re finements to the harmony of the whole, and the character of the morceau to the character of the composition, but ... let us love all three of them." With two or three well-chosen words Baudelaire has hit off the leading traits both of Daumier's work and of his personality. We are in a realm of solidly grounded health and normality — a high tableland of temperament from which adventures towards [ 43 ] /IONS^E DAUM/ER^ the stars or towards the abysses seem natural enough. Daumier in bondage or free, in prison or out, with equal nobility, conferring or receiving favors, is never unequal to himself. Through thou sands of designs his raciness and power are unflagging. It should be noted that his drawings are, practically without exception, complete compositions. Working with his mind unsparingly at all preliminary stages of creation, he saved his hand for the culmi nating moment. To put the matter in terms of the efficiency expert, probably no great artist has made fewer lost motions. The creative moment comes in all its purity, uncontaminated by a series of tentatives and failures; all the processes of preliminary selection and rejection being mental. This does not mean to say that Daumier's method is universally available, only that the very great artists generally reach a stage where mental preparation and memory are sufficient foundation for creation. It should be recalled that if Daumier's final execution was feverish and impetuous, it remained cautious to the end. His original lithographic stones show all sorts of corrections and erasures, but the task of execu tion is always unbroken, never spread out. It should be recalled also that such seeing as Daumier's was worth more than most artists' sketches and portfolios. To many a fine artist it is not given to see with such initial intensity or to hold the essentials [44] APPRECIA TIONS of the observation so long and clearly in mind. Such capacities are rare and rather a mark of the supreme spirits than a goal for every artist. Daumier's few pictures were inadequately appreciated during his lifetime, being naturally overshadowed by the copiousness of his work as an illustrator. And possibly we are only beginning to grasp the importance of these few panels and canvases. They cut sharply athwart the main pictorial ambition of the last century, which was to attain unprecedented richness, variety and express iveness of color. They counter equally the practice of Monet and the theory of Cezanne. In a manner they point back to Rem brandt, showing that color is merely instrumental, and the main thing the effective creation of a coherent world the validity of which is simply emotional and mental. This doctrine is being used today to cover all sorts of eccentricities and sensationalisms in the name of expression. Fundamentally it is not important that the artist should express himself, but rather that he should have in himself something that is worth expressing. This is a question that never can be begged, the artist has to prove it. The superiority of Daumier was in the broadest sense moral, consisting of his lucidity, his unshaken respect humain, his self-respect, his stalwart independ ence and his docile traditionalism. He never indulged the foolish [45] flONORE DAUMIER^ thought that brand new aesthetic values could or should be at tained by taking thought in a vacuum. His values were as old as humanity itself, as laughter and tears and scorn, his task merely to give them a new concentration and emphasis. Thus Daumier has never been in any way difficult or recondite except to tastes in some way spoiled through false education. Paris hailed him from the first, and fellow artists as various as Corot, Rousseau, and Millet accepted his greatness unquestioningly. He had the com monness that always goes with greatness. If the artist can really make his mind a place where beauty can be put and will stay, it will also be a place too where his fellow men will want to sojourn. The simplicity with which Daumier approached this ordeal of the artist is best expressed in his pictures, precisely because he is in them free from the journalistic requirement of exuber ance. In them, accordingly, he has given the completest image of his own mind, of its massiveness, its emotional depth, its rather simple mystery. With a complete faith in himself and his fellows, he assumes that the most straightforward and simple assertion of his own notion of his world will suffice. It is the better for its mere sufficient intimations of color, just as pages of the Bible are better without overt figures of speech or the obvious enrichments of poetry.; No one has approached the difficult task of complete self- [46] APPRECIA TIONS expression with more discretion, modesty, power, and solidarity with mankind generally. It is a road that only the great spirits may safely travel. There is room for representation, experiment, showers of color — naturalistic and abstract. What is unavoidable is the issue of judgment. It must, as Leonardo wrote five centuries ago, ever be better than the work, or the work itself is null ^Within these limits we do well to fol low Baudelaire's catholic counsel and love all excellent work. The best will always have a harmonious and essentially mysterious bal ance between judgment and passion, and perhaps the formula that most nearly comprises the grandeur of Honore Daumier is that which aged Auguste Rodin, in days when his own judgment and work were in very uneasy balance, invented for the Cathedral of Chartres. With a change of gender it serves for Daumier — "II est sage avecjmejassiojLinjense.'' [47] HONORE DAUMIER^ By Guy Pene du Bois THERE must be numberless reasons why satirists are rarely put in the first rank of pictorial art. The principal one, prob ably the least valid of all, rests in that they do not obviously deal in beauty. Perhaps it is a part of the world's economy, as it is of governments, to demand tribute; to desire that the press be favor able. Criticism, we are constantly told, if there must be criticism, is valueless except when it is constructive. In this argument the man who makes way for the builder by clearing the forest does not count. He is destructive. Voltaire and Swift, Hogarth and Daumier slapped their epochs. Their fault is greater in that the slaps were so well delivered that the clearing was thorough. No generation will entirely forgive them. Youth is idealistic and old age clings to its memories. Had Daumier been as idealistic as Rembrandt, for example, he would have been considered equally great. Daumier scratched the reverse side of the slate. It does not seem to matter that it was the same slate. Both had faith in man. One lauded him for his virtue, the other belabored him for falling short of it. The possibility of virtue is therefore admitted by both. However, if subject matter were carried into the final judgment of a work of [49] /IONORE DAUMIER art, Milton's Coney Island Paradise would be a long time dead. It is unquestionable that this generation in America is better prepared to accept the paintings of Daumier than any of its pred ecessors. His slaps are delivered at persons in other costumes than ours. He is politically in better accord. He is disarmed by dis tance. He has none of the biting whimsicality of the aristocratic Lautrec, none of Degas' cool dandyism. He is philosophically a Republican. Rembrandt, with some slight marks of respect for the privileged class, was that, and Courbet, with his remnant of romanticism, of a dying habit of elaboration. The idea of the substantial burgher which was given in the squat compositions of Seventeenth Century Dutch painters, with right angles, and square canvases, has carried into all Republican paintings since that time. It is undoubtedly a middle-class form, the form which is the back bone of the Republican state and built upon the generous lines of commercial integrity, symbol of bourgeois virtue. Hating pretense, Daumier is himself bare of all signs of it. He hits from the shoulder without subtlety. Though he is not Knut Hamsun's "great barge of a man," yet he would be immediately understood by him. He is a tremendous distance from wit, a man to be at sea amid the flashing passes of courtiers. Imagine him sweeping them aside with an enormously weighty gesture. He [5o] APPRECIA TIONS deafe-enh/in fundamentals. Some great artists have been aesthetic to the point of exoticism. They are artists' artists. Artists are usually dilettante. They see nature through their favorite pictures: a supersensitive minority they, the twelve men who would have satisfied Huysmans. Lovers of fragile, subtile and irrelevant bon mots, traders in rareties, they are men intrigued by chiselled sen tences, by the five-leaved clovers of culture. Daumier would have had no more use for them than he had for the "bas bleus" of his period. It is not easy to imagine him admiring Botticelli or, had he lived long enough, Beardsley. It is curious that he was one of Baudelaire's admirations, but then Baudelaire for all his Poeism was a fine judge of art. He condemned Ary Schaeffer against the opinion of the world and of Theophile Gautier. He stood by Delacroix and Meryon. DaunuexJOught-a-Jaalance^-He might have been Diogenes. In his drawings he assailed all human affertatinnSjjif times^ hur riedly and impatiently, with a slap-stick. This never appears in his paint. He was known widely as a draughtsman, to a com parative few as a painter. His paintings are rare. His Third Class Carriage, which, at the Borden sale brought $45,000, is the best known example on this side of the water. In paint is the full measure of the man, a deep throated voice, a rich nature, a [5i] /fONS%E DAUMIER^ language which, despite its tremendous directness and economy, never for a moment hints at barrenness. The man has a heart. He is a colorist; a colorist of a long line who derive color through the use of form rather than through the actual use of color. Rem brandt belongs in this line, and Millet, who, though a roman ticist, had not looked vainly at Daumier's paint. The solid qualities of that paint are a reflection of the man. The subject is of comparative insignificance, as subject always is. It does not matter that Daumier attacked lawyers as Moliere did doctors. The rhythm which is the gait of his soul is outside of it. The final judgment of him will and must be made upon his style. That Daumier was a satirist is not the primary consideration. That he was a man who, getting definite reactions from the life about him, created art, and that this art, aside from its literary import, had the force and beauty which must come from a real love of truth, is not only an essential consideration, it is the only one worth bothering about. [52] HONS%E DAUMIER^ By Mahonri Young '^HT^HERE is something of Michael Angelo in Daumier," said -L Balzac. We all know Daubigny's exclamation upon seeing Raphael's Stanza. If to these two points of view we add a certain far remembrance of Greece and a distant affinity to Rembrandt in the luminous sense of space and enveloping air in his painting we get some idea of the diverse strains of influence which go into the making of the unique, artistic personality of Honore Daumier; — caricaturist, satirist, illustrator on wood, lithographer, painter and sculptor. In his rich personality are gathered, as at a focus, a group of the most vital strains of the past. This is no mechanical and artificial gathering together of great qualities, as was attempted by the Carracci and certain modern artists, but is a genuine coming together in one figure of a number of great strains as we find in the world of nature. This was hardly con scious, I believe; Daumier was no eclectic. These strains entered into the stream of his blood and were part of the very fibre of his bone and sinew. His was a very rich inheritance from the past in deed. If this were all, we still might have only the spectacle of an artist rich in inheritance but impotent. But in no sense was this fine consummation negative, on the contrary, it was intensely [53] /IONORE DAUMIER^ active. With roots driven deep into the past its branches and leaves were thrust boldly into the future. It is a curious fact that Daumier's peer, contemporary and friend, Jean-Francois Millet, should have combined in about like proportions the same artistic lineage. I do not think that here was any conscious imitation but rather one of nature's parallelisms. Artistically, Daumier and Millet are of the same stuff. They dealt with form in the same large, synthetic way; they were alike in their classic sense of order; they had similar powers over light and space. They also dealt entirely with fundamentals in a large and grand manner. Millet was, perhaps, the more conscious and the more direct ob server, as he was the more classic artist. There was more of Poussin in him. His achievement was more complete. Daumier had more power, more vehemence, more go. As we examine his work we find the same richness of quality, but changed, profoundly affected by a vigorous and vivid person ality. The qualities are there, powerful as ever, but in the resultant achievement we are conscious of chagrin. These glorious powers were never to flower and fructify in their complete fullness— the result of circumstance. This frustration by circumstance was the malady of the art of the nineteenth century, a period which, in artistic talent and genius, is equal to any but the very greatest [54] APPRECIA TIONS centuries, but which in achievement, falls so lamentably short. Its course is strewn with wrecks and failures, partial and com plete, of its best and rarest. Most of its men of genius were either tragedies, partial or complete, or thwarted and turned from their course if tough enough to persist. Daumier was no exception. When we view the vast bulk of his published work, and inspired hack work it was, approximately 4000 lithographs and 1 000 drawings on wood, we are aghast at his prolific output. If this were all, if he had let it rest at that, if he had not done his draw ings Li pen and ink, in sepia, his water colors, his few and rarely finished paintings, his essays in sculpture, we should never have had this sense of incomplete achievement. In these paintings, which found no market, these drawings done for his own pleas ure, and in this sculpture we find qualities carried to a higher plane, to a plane only attained occasionally in his regular work as lithographer. There is no feeling of a lack of ability in him to carry these highest qualities through, but a feeling of his not being allowed to. His world did not want his best; it was pleased with his second best; the thing he could do for a living, and so it chained him to the wheel of his caricature. This is not entirely to be regretted, for though we are not allowed to gorge our fill on the richest viands of his feast, we are allowed to sample them, I 55 j /lONS^E DAUMIER-^*p-"' ; Les Emigrants, ou Les Fugitifs <5Si a Ecce homo, ou Nous voulons Barrabas Le Meunier, son Fils et son Ane Trois Avocats Mere et Enfant Le Repos des Saltimbanques Hercule de foire Saltimbanques Scene de la Revolution 53 <3 La Lecture du manuscrit Paysans dinant rv-j fcl Si «to-. «-> fcl . .: ., ¦• Don Quixote .Hl.VAM'll. Dcpilc. UJputi el fcwgn Caricatures in Painted Clay Les Fugitifs de la sagesse A u Theatre francais L' Arrive e du train Un Wagon de troisieme class e Dans V atelier d'un artiste L 'Amateur La Chanson a boire Le Defenseur A pres l' audience Si L! Ivresse de Silene I. J Pen and Ink Drawing Drawing 123 Njchdenklich 124. Kindermadchen 115. Der Gratuiant 126. Dolce far niente Woodcuts Une Promenade sur la rive de la Seine a Vepoque de la canicule *r,lSi|ii!iil«Jl f* ill feUhI i I in i ; ll 1 1 Dtf;z.r /a maison de retraite a deux heures du soir •*:?%jjpn' l! felt Z> Theatre a, Jules Favre Jour de naissance de Papa Si « D'ici vous pouvez voir la Tour de St. Jacques Un Jour de Revue Aux Champs-Elysees YALE UNIVERSITY a39002 003207272b