Honore Daumier

Honore Daumier was born in Marseille, France, in February 1808. Major reference sources disagree on the exact day, with some giving the 20th and others the 26th. His family moved to Paris in 1816. He received a conventional education that held little interest for him, and by around 1822 the antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir began giving him informal lessons in the fundamentals of drawing. The following year he entered the informal Academie Suisse in Paris, where he drew from live models alongside other young artists, and he supplemented this training with self-directed sketching from sculpture in the Louvre.

By the mid to late 1820s Daumier had learned lithography from Charles Ramelet and was working for the printer Zephirin Belliard, producing illustrations, advertisements, street scenes, portraits, and caricatures. In 1832 he was tried and imprisoned for several months after a caricature satirizing King Louis-Philippe, an early instance of the legal risk his political caricature could carry. He went on to become France's best known caricaturist of the nineteenth century, producing a graphic output that Christie's puts at more than 4,000 lithographs, alongside paintings and sculpture, including satirical work such as Rue Transnonain and his recurring courtroom scenes of lawyers and judges. A major exhibition of his paintings followed in Paris in 1878. He died in Valmondois, France, in February 1879. Here too the exact day is disputed, with major sources split between the 10th and the 11th. According to the Getty Museum, he died nearly blind and in poverty; the National Gallery of Canada notes that his paintings were only widely acclaimed after his death.

Reference sources consistently describe Daumier as France's best known caricaturist of the nineteenth century, renowned for cartoons and drawings that satirized French politics and society, and as a painter and sculptor in his own right. His reputation has been sustained through institutional attention long after his death, including a major traveling retrospective devoted to his full career, jointly organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1979 and 1980, and continuing museum interest such as the Albertina Museum's survey exhibition on Daumier and social satire and Buffalo AKG's exhibition on his lithographs. His work continues to appear in collection focused exhibitions at institutions including Museum Folkwang in Essen and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

The record price at auction for a work by Daumier is USD 2,629,000, paid for the painting Les Avocats (Le Parquet des Avocats) at Sotheby's New York in 2013, according to MutualArt's market data. The exact calendar date of that sale is not confirmed in currently available sources. More recent sales have stayed well below that level: a painting titled L'avocat lisant sold at Koller Auctions in Switzerland on 20 September 2024 for a total of roughly CHF 650,000 including premium, according to the Daumier Register, well short of the 2013 result. Because Daumier produced a very large body of lithographs but a much smaller number of paintings and sculptures, auction prices vary enormously by medium and rarity, and headline results are driven by the occasional painting or sculpture rather than by his more plentiful prints.

Even basic biographical facts about Daumier carry documented uncertainty. Major reference sources disagree on the exact day of both his birth and his death, though they agree on the years, 1808 and 1879, and the places, Marseille and Valmondois. No published catalogue raisonne is confirmed in current sources. The independent Daumier Register is the principal scholarly resource for verifying his prints and drawings, and paintings and sculpture should be checked against museum and auction provenance records. He has no living gallery or estate representation in the contemporary sense. His work currently appears at secondary market dealers such as Jack Rutberg Fine Arts and Gallery 19C, and it is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Given that the auction record rests on a single painting sale and high value results are scarce, collectors should treat any individual price point as one data point in a thin, historically documented market rather than as part of a smooth trend line.