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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 is more gently satirical than many. It depicts an elderly bourgeois couple, walking arm-in-arm in among greenery. Entitled (in translation) A return of youth, it is no. 89 in Daumier's ironically entitled The best days of life, published in Le Charivari in 1846. The old man turns his head to the right to look at the woman and rests his right hand over hers. The old woman wears a bonnet and holds a flower in her left hand. Her expression indicates that she isn't particularly pleased to be fussed over by her husband. No doubt the greenery was the scene of the courtship, perhaps even the marriage proposal, of this couple when they were young and lovely half a century earlier.
See:
Wikipedia, 'Honoré Daumier', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_Daumier
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2016