The Empire again was less favourable to caricature. Not that there was any want of material, but the censorship kept a strict watch over the welfare of France. Besides, the artists who made their appearance after David lived on Olympus, and would have nothing to do with the common things of life. Neither draughtsmen nor engravers could effect anything so long as they saw themselves overlooked by a Greek or Roman phantom as they bent over their paper or their plate of copper, and felt it their duty to suggest the stiff lines of antique statues beneath the folds of modern costume.

Bosio was the genuine product of this style. Every one of his pictures has become tedious, because of a spurious classicism to which he adhered with inflexible consistency. He cannot draw a grisette without seeing her with David’s eyes. It deprives his figures of truth and interest. Something of the correctness of a schoolmistress is peculiar to them. His grace is too classic, his merriment too well-bred, and everything in them too carefully arranged to give the idea of scenes rapidly depicted from life. Beauty of line is offered in place of spontaneity of observation, and even the character of the drawing is lost in a pedantic elegance which envelopes everything with the uniformly graceful veil of an insipidly fluent outline.

L’Art.
DAUMIER.   THE CONNOISSEURS.

As soon as Romanticism had broken with the classic system, certain great draughtsmen, who laid a bold hand on modern life without being shackled by æsthetic formulæ, came to the front in France. Henri Monnier, the eldest of them, was born a year after the proclamation of the Empire. Cloaks, plumes, and sabretasches were the first impressions of his youth; he saw the return of triumphant armies and heard the fanfare of victorious trumpets. The Old Guard remained his ideal, the inglorious kingship of the Restoration his abhorrence. He was a supernumerary clerk in the Department of Justice when in 1828 his first brochure, Mœurs administratives dessinées d’aprés nature par Henri Monnier, disclosed to his superiors that the eyes of this poor young man in the service of the Ministry had seen more than they should have done. Dismissed from his post, he was obliged to support himself by his pencil, and became the chronicler of the epoch. In Monnier’s prints breathes the happy Paris of the good old times, a Paris which in these days scarcely exists even in the provinces. His “Joseph Proudhomme,” from his shoe-buckles to his stand-up collar, from his white cravat to his blue spectacles, is as immortal as Eisele und Beisele, Schulze und Müller, or Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Monnier himself is his own Proudhomme. He is the Philistine in Paris, enjoying little Parisian idylls with a bourgeois complacency. With him there is no distinction between beautiful and ugly; he finds that everything in nature can be turned to account. How admirably the different worlds of Parisian society are discriminated in his Quartiers de Paris! How finely he has portrayed the grisette of the period, with her following of young tradesmen and poor students! As yet she has not blossomed into the fine lady, the luxurious blasée woman of the next generation. She is still the bashful modiste or dressmaker’s apprentice whose outings in the country are described by Paul de Kock, a pretty child in a short skirt who lives in an attic and dresses up only when she goes to the theatre or into the country on a Sunday. Monnier gives her an air of good-nature, something delightfully childlike. In the society of her adorers she is content with the cheapest pleasures, drinks cider and eats cakes, rides on a donkey or breakfasts amid the trees, and hardly coquets at all when a fat old gentleman follows her on the boulevards. These innocent flirtations remind one as little of the more recent lorettes of Gavarni as these in their turn anticipate the drunken street-walkers of Rops.

Under Louis Philippe began the true modern period of French caricature, the flourishing time when really great artists devoted themselves to it. It never raised its head more proudly than under the bourgeois king, whose onion head always served the relentless Philippon as a target for his wit. It was never armed in more formidable fashion; it never dealt more terrible blows. Charles Philippon’s famous journal La Caricature was the most powerful lever that the republicans used against the “July government”; it was equally feared by the Ministry, the bourgeoisie, and the throne. When the Charivari followed La Caricature in 1832, political cartoons began to give way to the simple portraiture of manners in French life. The powder made for heavy guns exploded in a facile play of fireworks improvised for the occasion.

French society in the nineteenth century has to thank principally Daumier and Gavarni for being brought gradually within the sphere of artistic representation. These men are usually called caricaturists, yet they were in reality the great historians of their age. Through long years they laboured every week and almost every day at their great history, which embraced thousands of chapters—at a true zoology of the human species; and their work, drawn upon stone in black and white, proves them not merely genuine historians, but really eminent artists who merit a place beside the greatest.

L’Art.L’Art.
DAUMIER.THE MOUNTEBANKS.DAUMIER.IN THE ASSIZE COURT.
(By permission of M. Eugène Montrosier, the ownerof the picture.)

When in his young days Daubigny trod the pavement of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he is said to have exclaimed in astonishment, “That looks as if it had been done by Daumier!” and from that time Daumier was aptly called the Michael Angelo of caricature. Even when he is laughing there is a Florentine inspiration of the terrible in his style, a grotesque magnificence, a might suggestive of Buonarotti. In the period before 1848 he dealt the constitutional monarchy crushing blows by his drawings. “Le Ventre legislatif” marks the furthest point to which political caricature ever ventured in France. But when he put politics on one side and set himself free from Philippon, this same man made the most wonderful drawings from life. His “Robert Macaire” giving instructions to his clerk as a tradesman, sending his patients exorbitant bills as doctor to the poor, lording it over the bourse as banker, taking bribes as juryman, and fleecing a peasant as land-agent, is the incarnation of the bourgeois monarchy, a splendid criticism on the money-grubbing century. Politicians, officials, artists, actors, honest citizens, old-clothes-mongers, newspaper-boys, impecunious painters, the most various and the basest creatures are treated by his pencil, and appear on pages which are often terrible in their depth and truthfulness of observation. The period of Louis Philippe is accurately portrayed in these prints, every one of which belongs to the great volume of the human tragicomedy. In his “Émotions parisiennes” and “Bohémiens de Paris” he deals with misfortune, hunger, the impudence of vice, and the horror of misery. His “Histoire ancienne” ridiculed the absurdity of Classicism à la David at a time when it was still regarded as high treason to touch this sacred fane. These modern figures with the classical pose, which to some extent parodied David’s pictures, were probably what first brought his contemporaries to a sense of the stiffness and falsity of the whole movement; and at a later period Offenbach also contributed his best ideas with much the same result. Moreover, Daumier was a landscape-painter of the first order. No one has more successfully rendered the appearance of bridges and houses, of quays and streets under a downpour, of nature enfeebled as it is in the precincts of Paris. He was an instantaneous photographer without a rival, a physiognomist such as Breughel was in the sixteenth century, Jan Steen and Brouwer in the seventeenth, and Chodowiecki in the eighteenth, with the difference that his drawing was as broad and powerful as Chodowiecki’s was delicate and refined. This inborn force of line, suggestive of Jordaens, places his sketches as high, considered as works of art, as they are invaluable as historical documents. The treatment is so summary, the outline so simplified, the pantomime, gesticulation, and pose always so expressive; and Daumier’s influence on several artists is beyond doubt. Millet, the great painter of peasants, owes much to the draughtsman of the bourgeois. Precisely what constitutes his “style,” the great line, the simplification, the intelligent abstention from anecdotic trifles, are things which he learnt from Daumier.

During the years when he drew for the Charivari, Gavarni was the exact opposite of Daumier. In the one was a forceful strength, in the other a refined grace; in the one brusque and savage observation and almost menacing sarcasm, in the other the wayward mood of the butterfly flitting lightly from flower to flower. Daumier might be compared with Rabelais; Gavarni, the spirituel journalist of the grand monde and the demi-monde, the draughtsman of elegance and of roués and lorettes, might be compared with Molière. Born of poor parentage in Paris in 1801, and in his youth a mechanician, he supported himself from the year 1835 by fashion prints and costume drawings. He undertook the conduct of a fashion journal, Les Gens du Monde, and began it with a series of drawings from the life of the jeunesse dorée: les Lorettes, les Actrices, les Fashionables, les Artistes, les Étudiants de Paris, les Bals masqués, les Souvenirs du Carnaval, la Vie des Jeunes Hommes. A new world was here revealed with bold traits. The women of Daumier are good, fat mothers, always busy, quick-witted, and of an enviable constitution; women who are careful in the management of their household, and who go to market and take their husband’s place at his office when necessary. In Gavarni the women are piquant and given to pouting, draped in silk and enveloped in soft velvet mantles. They are fond of dining in the cabinet particulier, and of scratching the name of their lover, for the time being, upon crystal mirrors.

Quantin, Paris.
DAUMIER.“LA VOILÀ ... MA MAISON DE CAMPAGNE.”