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Overview
Honoré Daumier (1808-79) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter and sculptor, whose many works offer an acerbic, humorous and constantly intelligent commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century. Daumier produced over 500 paintings, 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings and 100 sculptures. A prolific draughtsman, he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behaviour of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognised.
Daumier produced his caricatures for the comic journal Le Charivari, in which he held bourgeois society up to ridicule in the figure of Robert Macaire, hero of a popular melodrama. In another series, L'histoire ancienne, he took aim at the stultifying pseudo-classicism of the art of the period. In 1848 Daumier embarked again on his political campaign, still in the service of Le Charivari, which he left in 1863 and rejoined in 1864. A humanitarian left-winger with a tremendous gift for mordant social satire, Daumier was frequently in conflict with conservative government authorities, and was imprisoned for six months in 1832. He had many powerful admirers, however, including critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, who called Daumier 'One of the most important men, not only I would say in caricature but also in modern art'.
This lithograph comes from a series of 70, 14 of which were not published in Le Charivari, including this one, making it a rarity and probably all the more attractive to Sir John Ilott, who donated it to the National Art Gallery in 1958. The series is entitled, in translation, 'Whatever you wish'. Here Daumier targets familiar themes of bourgeois life, and in this print, he is probably targetting conservative primness as well as the excesses of fashion.
The caption translates as 'Well I never, there goes a man disguised as a woman!' and the indignant surprise on the man's part is nicely recaptured by Daumier. The joke could well be on the man, as it was fashionable for women to wear long pants down to their ankles under their gowns during this period.
See:
Charles F. Ramus, Daumier, 120 Great Lithographs (1978), p. 129.
Wikipedia, 'Honoré Daumier', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_Daumier
Dr Mark Stocker Curator Historical International Art April