Dali House

“The Burden (The Laundress)”, circa 1850-53

Born 200 years ago this year, Honoré Daumier endowed caricature with art and art with humanity. But where was he 166 years ago today, August 27? He was starting a jail term for being a wise guy.

Too much of the sweet life only leaves you with wisdomless molars in agony, and where is Daumier when you need him? “Have a toothache? See Daumier!” Van Gogh wrote to Theo. He’d seen a Daumier drawing called “The Excursion Train” and forgot all about his rotting bite.

You would think Honoré Daumier would be everywhere in this bicentennial of his birthday. There have indeed been a string of exhibitions in Germany, and according to Wikipedia, Asia and Australia dusted him off for his 200th, but for the most part it seems that the French keep him pretty much to themselves, amid couched allusions to his whereabouts.

Where is this “Villa Daumier” where he died early in 1879, blind and destitute and dependent upon the kindness of better-off painters? Was the little house that Corot bought for him in Valmondois or Auvers? Online sources can’t seem to agree, though surely the website of Valmondois itself, from which this photo came, can be trusted when it says it’s there … but where? It offers no address, just a “Come and see the latest of the exhibitions by other artists that we put on at the villa.”

It’s on Chemin Bescherelle, another source says, but try finding the great lexicographer’s name anywhere in the vicinity. Instead, others insist, it’s right on the main drag, and since a Place Honoré Daumier adjoins it, the house must be there, right? Here’s Google Earth’s view of the neighbourhood.

That’s presumably the town square just beyond Place Honoré Daumier in this shot, where there’s a bust of Daumier by Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume.

Valmondois says online it installed the sculpture in 1909, the centenary of Honoré’s birth in far-off Marseilles.

When Daumier died his body was carted over the the town cemetery, but it didn’t stay there long, as we shall see in a moment.

Not far from Place Honoré Daumier are Allée Maurice de Vlaminck and Rue Dorée. Vlaminck certainly spent time in Valmondois, well after Daumier’s day, but I’m not sure about Gustave Dorée. France has a tendency to honour its artists this way in any old town, no matter where they hung out. Charles-François Daubigny is said to have been a resident of Valmondois, but his famously decorated house is in Auvers, adding to the muddle.

Where is the house of Théodore Rousseau in Barbizon, where Daumier spent his summer vacation in 1865? Barbizon has a Rue Théodore Rousseau — you can see it shouldering off from the main street in the image below. Interestingly, that road is crossed by little Allée John Constable, just in case the English forgot to pay tribute to their landscape maestro.

Daumier’s final and forever address is easier to find. He’s here amid Death’s busy clutter in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, his friend Corot within eternal reach. Daumier’s admirers decided a year or so after he died that he deserved to be among the greats in Paris’ best-known graveyard, so they disengaged him from Valmondois’ clutch.

The gravesite and its hefty cap of a stone were spruced up in time for the 2008 commemorations by the modern-day enthusiasts at Dieter and Lilian Noack’s formidable dual fansite Daumier.org and the Daumier Register. I owe the Noacks a link for their pictures I’ve borrowed.

In life, Daumier’s Paris addresses included Rue Saint-Denis, Boulevard Rochechouart, Rue l’Abbaye and Boulevard Clichy, but it was at 9 Quai d’Anjou on the Ile Saint-Louis, shown in the aerial view below, where he spent a full two decades. In 1989, the centenary of his death, admirers placed a plaque on the front wall to say so.

In this bird’s-eye view you can see the Quai d’Anjou’s proximity to yet another Daumier address, one he maintained reluctantly for six terrible months: 56 rue de la Clef.

There’s little to see there today, but this was the site of Sainte-Pélagie, the stout prison that split the glut of revolutionaries with the Bastille and, soon after that, accommodated the Marquis de Sade and the insubtractable mathematician Évariste Galois.

Gustave Courbet did porridge in this jail as well, a generation after our protagonist, for crimes against the Commune, and later proudly offered a pensive “Self-portrait at Sainte-Pélagie”.

On August 27, 1832 — 166 years ago today — the 24-year-old Daumier began his term at Sainte-Pélagie.

Honoré Daumier was born on February 26, 1808, to a glazier who moved his family to the capital so he could stop being a glazier and start being a poet.

As a youth Honoré ran errands for a legal clerk, which explains all the judges and lawyers festooning his art — “The Defender”, below, from about 1863, is a striking example — but Daumier had to overcome his father’s resistance before he could pursue his true calling.

In 1823 he had training at the Académie Suisse while working for a lithographer and publisher. The die was abruptly cast for a life that would produce more than 4,000 lithographic works and a thousand woodcuts, as well as 300 paintings, 800 drawings and many sculptures. You can easily lose yourself browsing through the Daumier Register, never tiring of the endless surprises.

It was a life spent on behalf of the common man, a category to which Daumier always belonged, even after his popularity as a spokesman blossomed. There were rights to be championed, and when Louis Philippe came to the throne and loosened the state’s chains on the public’s right to bear grudges, there were score-settling newspapers to be sold by the scores.

Daumier became an illustrator at Charles Philipon’s satiric journal La Caricature. He was part of a team that snapped at establishment heels and at the shins of the bourgeoisie that kowtowed to corruption and incompetence.

On December 15, 1831, the newspaper published a Daumier drawing called “Gargantua”, which showed the mighty king perched on a toilet throne, being fed bags of coins and shitting out laws. Louis Philippe decided at this stage he’d been too lenient with the press, and the cops made their move.

Within two months Daumier and his printer and editor were in front of the judges, charged with lèse majesté. They all got a hefty fine and a six-month jail term. Daumier — curse his luck — was the only one who would see the inside of a prison, though not quite yet: sentence suspended.

He went back to his drawing board unrepentant, and by August had handed the prosecutors adequate fuel to ignite his funeral pyre. The “Michelangelo of caricature” was carted off to Sainte-Pélagie on August 27, and wouldn’t walk out until the end of the following January.

By then Philipon had replaced La Caricature with Le Charivari, and while the old gang could no longer get away with quite the same fervour of state-bashing, there were plenty of gainful targets left — crass civil servants, bombastic barristers, conniving profiteers, even the pompous new art fad, neo-classicism. Daumier, a realist, had no patience for sentimentality.

He had Leonardo’s gift for caricature, and in remoulding physical features he illuminated all the follies and absurdities of modern life. Delacroix, Baudelaire and Degas were his fans. The bullies of the establishment were his victims.

Below is “Transnonain Street” from 1834, a document of the mass murder of all the occupants of a house on that road during the people’s insurrections that year. The drawing was so brutally frank that hundreds of copies were destroyed. This was the young, savage Daumier.

After prison, a more subdued Honoré, though no less a conscience. This is “The Beggars” from about 1845.

In February 1846 Daumier had a son. In April he married the infant’s mother, a 24-year-old seamstress he called Didine, or Nini. The child died two years later. Perhaps it was during one of cholera’s regular visits to Paris. Below is “In Church”, from around 1860, a moving drama in shadow and light — no wonder Degas liked him!

About this time Daumier was riding the trains a lot, still a fairly novel means of transport in those days. He did two thick portfolios for Le Charivari called “Les Chemins de Fer”, filled with railway and tram passengers lulled to complacence by locomotion or stoked to indignation by its frequent failings.

But where is this drawing, “Excursion Train”, that Vincent found “so true”? He described it to his brother as “travellers with pale faces and black coats in rough weather arriving on the platform too late, among them women with crying babies”. The closest I’ve found is the one below, “An Endless Waiting Time at the Station”.

The caption reads: “It is astounding! Usually the train is only three-quarters of an hour late, and today we have already waited an hour and a half. Punctuality isn’t the virtue of the railways!” This is evidently a play on the adage, “Punctuality is the virtue of kings.”

There is also this one, “Excursion Train a Trifle Too Gay” …

And then there is this famous image, “The Third-Class Carriage”, painted between 1860 and ‘63 …

Nicolas Pioch, at his wonderful Web Museum, savours the “simple power and economy of line”.

“The hands, for example, are reduced to mere outlines but beautifully drawn. The bodies are as solid as clay, their bulk indicated by stressing the essential and avoiding the non-essential. These are not portraits of particular people, but of mankind.”

Compare this work to two others, one — “A Wagon of the Third Class” — nearly a copy, the other further down, simply called “Third Class”, a variation on the theme …

Trains in Daumier’s day didn’t race down the tracks, they waddled at a mechanical saunter, out of a very real concern that moving faster than 25 kilometres per hour could cause serious brain damage.

Our Honoré would have had no fear of speed. Having withstood more than one cholera epidemic, he launched himself full tilt at windmills, like his hero Don Quixote, of whom he did no fewer than 29 paintings and 49 drawings.

In the 1870s, blinded by seeing too much, Daumier pushed past the officials who were trying to pin the Légion d’Honneur on his jacket and withdrew to Valmondois, to the “little house” Corot lied to him about, saying he owned it but had no use for it. “It is not for you that I do this,” Camille said, “it is merely to annoy your landlord!”

On February 10, 1879, Honoré Daumier died there at age 71.

Shown here, a detail from “Crispin and Scapin”, the mysterious onstage aside, and below, from around 1869, “The Artist”.