AS we attempt, at the present day, to write the history of everything,
it would be strange if we had happened to neglect the annals of
caricature; for the very essence of the art of Cruikshank and Gavarni,
of Daumier and Leech, is to be historical; and every one knows how
addicted is this great science to discoursing about itself. Many
industrious seekers, in England and France, have ascended the stream
of time to the source of the modern movement of pictorial satire. The
stream of time is in this case mainly the stream of journalism; for
social and political caricature, as the present century has practised
it, is only journalism made doubly vivid.
The subject indeed is a large one, if we reflect upon it, for many
people would tell us that journalism is the greatest invention of our
age. If this rich affluent has shared the great fortune of the general
torrent, so, on other sides, it touches the fine arts, touches manners,
touches morals. All this helps to account for its inexhaustible
life; journalism is the criticism of the moment _at_ the moment, and
caricature is that criticism at once simplified and intensified by a
plastic form. We know the satiric image as periodical, and above all as
punctual--the characteristics of the printed sheet with which custom has
at last inveterately associated it.
This, by-the-way, makes us wonder considerably at the failure of
caricature to achieve, as yet, a high destiny in America--a failure
which might supply an occasion for much explanatory discourse, much
searching of the relations of things. The newspaper has been taught
to flourish among us as it flourishes nowhere else, and to flourish
moreover on a humorous and irreverent basis; yet it has never taken to
itself this helpful concomitant of an unscrupulous spirit and a quick
periodicity. The explanation is probably that it needs an old society to
produce ripe caricature. The newspaper thrives in the United States, but
journalism languishes; for the lively propagation of news is one thing
and the large interpretation of it is another. A society has to be old
before it becomes critical, and it has to become critical before it can
take pleasure in the reproduction of its incongruities by an instrument
as impertinent as the indefatigable crayon. Irony, scepticism, pessimism
are, in any particular soil, plants of gradual growth, and it is in the
art of caricature that they flower most aggressively. Furthermore they
must be watered by education--I mean by the education of the eye and
hand--all of which things take time. The soil must be rich too, the
incongruities must swarm. It is open to doubt whether a pure democracy
is very liable to make this particular satiric return upon itself; for
which it would seem tha’ certain social complications are indispensable.
These complications are supplied from the moment a democracy becomes,
as we may say, impure from its own point of view; from the moment
variations and heresies, deviations or perhaps simple affirmations
of taste and temper begin to multiply within it. Such things afford a
_point d’appui_; for it is evidently of the essence of caricature to be
reactionary. We hasten to add that its satiric force varies immensely in
kind and in degree according to the race, or to the individual talent,
that takes advantage of it.
I used just now the term pessimism; but that was doubtless in a
great measure because I have been turning over a collection of the
extraordinarily vivid drawings of Honoré Daumier. The same impression
would remain with me, no doubt, if I had been consulting an equal
quantity of the work of Gavarni the wittiest, the most literary and most
acutely profane of all chartered mockers with the pencil. The feeling of
disrespect abides in all these things, the expression of the spirit for
which humanity is definable primarily by its weaknesses. For Daumier
these weaknesses are altogether ugly and grotesque, while for Gavarni
they are either basely graceful or touchingly miserable; but the vision
of them in both cases is close and direct. If, on the other hand, we
look through a dozen volumes of the collection of _Punch_ we get an
equal impression of hilarity, but we by no means get an equal impression
of irony. Certainly the pages of _Punch_ do not reek with pessimism;
their “criticism of life” is gentle and forbearing. Leech is positively
optimistic; there is at any rate nothing infinite in his irreverence;
it touches bottom as soon as it approaches the pretty woman or the nice
girl. It is such an apparition as this that really, in Gavarni, awakes
the scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Gavarni, but his sense of
beauty conjures away almost everything save our minor vices. It is
in the exploration of our major ones that Gavarni makes his principal
discoveries of charm or of absurdity of attitude. None the less, of
course, the general inspiration of both artists is the same: the desire
to try the innumerable different ways in which the human subject may
_not_ be taken seriously.
If this view of that subject, in its plastic manifestations, makes
history of a sort, it will not in general be of a kind to convert those
persons who find history sad reading. The writer of the present lines
remained unconverted, lately, on an occasion on which many cheerful
influences were mingled with his impression. They were of a nature to
which he usually does full justice, even overestimating perhaps their
charm of suggestion; but, at the hour I speak of, the old Parisian quay,
the belittered print-shop, the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the
great Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of the
sallow _estampes_ suspended in window and doorway--all these elements
of a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, that
general vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together as
I drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passing
the shop when I noticed in a small _vitrine_, let into the embrasure of
the doorway, half a dozen soiled, striking lithographs, which it took no
more than a first glance to recognize as the work of Daumier. They were
only old pages of the _Charivari_, torn away from the text and rescued
from the injury of time; and they were accompanied with an inscription
to the effect that many similar examples of the artist were to be seen
within. To become aware of this circumstance was to enter the shop and
to find myself promptly surrounded with bulging; _cartons_ and tattered
relics. These relics--crumpled leaves of the old comic journals of the
period from 1830 to 1855--are neither rare nor expensive; but I happened
to have lighted on a particularly copious collection, and I made the
most of my small good-fortune, in order to transmute it, if possible,
into a sort of compensation for my having missed unavoidably, a few
months before, the curious exhibition “de la Caricature Moderne” held
for several weeks just at hand, in the École des Beaux-Arts.
Daumier was said to have appeared there in considerable force; and it
was a loss not to have had that particular opportunity of filling one’s
mind with him.
There was perhaps a perversity in having wished to do so, strange,
indigestible stuff of contemplation as he might appear to be; but the
perversity had had an honorable growth. Daumier’s great days were in the
reign of Louis-Philippe; but in the early years of the Second Empire
he still plied his coarse and formidable pencil. I recalled, from a
juvenile consciousness, the last failing strokes of it. They used to
impress me in Paris, as a child, with their abnormal blackness as well
as with their grotesque, magnifying movement, and there was something in
them that rather scared a very immature admirer. This small personage,
however, was able to perceive later, when he was unfortunately deprived
of the chance of studying them, that there were various things in them
besides the power to excite a vague alarm. Daumier was perhaps a great
artist; at all events unsatisfied curiosity increased in proportion to
that possibility.
The first complete satisfaction of it was really in the long hours that
I spent in the little shop on the quay. There I filled my mind with
him, and there too, at no great cost, I could make a big parcel of these
cheap reproductions of his work. This work had been shown in the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts as it came from his hand; M. Champfleury, his biographer,
his cataloguer and devotee, having poured forth the treasures of a
precious collection, as I suppose they would be called in the case of an
artist of higher flights. It was only as he was seen by the readers of
the comic journals of his day that I could now see him; but I tried to
make up for my want of privilege by prolonged immersion. I was not able
to take home all the portfolios from the shop on the quay, but I took
home what I could, and I went again to turn over the superannuated
piles. I liked looking at them on the spot; I seemed still surrounded by
the artist’s vanished Paris and his extinct Parisians. Indeed no quarter
of the delightful city probably shows, on the whole, fewer changes from
the aspect it wore during the period of Louis-Philippe, the time when
it will ever appear to many of its friends to have been most delightful.
The long line of the quay is unaltered, and the rare charm of the river.
People came and went in the shop: it is a wonder how many, in the course
of an hour, may lift the latch even of an establishment that pretends to
no great business. What was all this small, sociable, contentious
life but the great Daumier’s subject-matter? He was the painter of the
Parisian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeois was in the air.
M. Champfleury has given a summary of Daumier’s career in his smart
little _Histoire e la Caricature Moderne_, a record not at all abundant
in personal detail. The biographer has told his story better perhaps in
his careful catalogue of the artist’s productions, the first sketch of
which is to be found in _L’Art_ for 1878. This copious list is Daumier’s
real history; his life cannot have been a very different business from
his work. I read in the interesting publication of M. Grand-Carteret
(_Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France_ 1888) that our artist produced
nearly 4000 lithographs and a thousand drawings on wood, up to the time
when failure of eyesight compelled him to rest. This is not the sort
of activity that leaves a man much time for independent adventures, and
Daumier was essentially of the type, common in France, of the specialist
so immersed in his specialty that he can be painted in only one
attitude--a general circumstance which perhaps helps to account for
the paucity, in that country, of biography, in our English sense of the
word, in proportion to the superabundance of criticism.
Honoré Daumier was born at Marseilles February 26th, 1808; he died
on the 11th of the same month, 1879. His main activity, however,
was confined to the earlier portion of a career of almost exactly
seventy-one years, and I find it affirmed in Vapereau’s _Dictionnaire
des Contemporains_ that he became completely blind between 1850 and
1860. He enjoyed a pension from the State of 2400 francs; but what
relief from misery could mitigate a quarter of a century of darkness
for a man who had looked out at the world with such vivifying eyes? His
father had followed the trade of a glazier, but was otherwise vocal
than in the emission of the rich street-cry with which we used all to be
familiar, and which has vanished with so many other friendly pedestrian
notes. The elder Daumier wrought verses as well as window-panes, and M.
Champfleury has disinterred a small volume published by him in 1823.
The merit of his poetry is not striking; but he was able to transmit the
artistic nature to his son, who, becoming promptly conscious of it, made
the inevitable journey to Paris in search of fortune.
The young draughtsman appeared to have missed at first the way to this
boon; inasmuch as in the year 1832 he found himself condemned to six
months’ imprisonment for a lithograph disrespectful to Louis-Philippe.
This drawing had appeared in the _Caricature_, an organ of pictorial
satire founded in those days by one Philipon, with the aid of a band of
young mockers to whom he gave ideas and a direction, and several others,
of whom Gavarni, Henry Monnier, Decamps, Grandville, were destined to
make themselves a place. M. Eugène Montrosier, in a highly appreciative
article on Daumier in _L’Art_ for 1878, says that this same Philipon
was _le journalisme fait homme_; which did not prevent him--rather
in fact fostered such a result--from being perpetually in delicate
relations with the government. He had had many horses killed under
him, and had led a life of attacks, penalties, suppressions and
resurrections. He subsequently established the _Charivari_ and launched
a publication entitled _L’Association Lithographique Mensuelle_, which
brought to light much of Daumier’s early work. The artist passed
rapidly from seeking his way to finding it, and from an ineffectual to a
vigorous form.
In this limited compass and in the case of such a quantity of production
it is almost impossible to specify--difficult to pick dozens of examples
out of thousands. Daumier became more and more the political spirit of
the _Charivari_, or at least the political pencil, for M. Philipon, the
breath of whose nostrils was opposition--one perceives from here the
little bilious, bristling, ingenious, insistent man--is to be credited
with a suggestive share in any enterprise in which he had a hand. This
pencil played over public life, over the sovereign, the ministers,
the deputies, the peers, the judiciary, the men and the measures,
the reputations and scandals of the moment, with a strange, ugly,
extravagant, but none the less sane and manly vigor. Daumier’s sign is
strength above all, and in turning over his pages to-day there is no
intensity of force that the careful observer will not concede to him. It
is perhaps another matter to assent to the proposition, put forth by
his greatest admirers among his countrymen, that he is the first of
all caricaturists. To the writer of this imperfect sketch he remains
considerably less interesting than Gavarni; and/or a particular reason,
which it is difficult to express otherwise than by saying that he is too
simple. Simplicity was not Gavarni’s fault, and indeed to a large
degree it was Daumier’s merit. The single grossly ridiculous or almost
hauntingly characteristic thing which his figures represent is largely
the reason why they still represent life and an unlucky reality years
after the names attached to them have parted with a vivifying power.
Such vagueness has overtaken them, for the most part, and to such a thin
reverberation have they shrunk, the persons and the affairs which
were then so intensely sketchable. Daumier handled them with a want of
ceremony which would have been brutal were it not for the element of
science in his work, making them immense and unmistakable in their
drollery, or at least in their grotesqueness; for the term drollery
suggests gayety, and Daumier is anything but gay. _Un rude peintre de
moeurs_, M. Champfleury calls him; and the phrase expresses his extreme
breadth of treatment.
Of the victims of his “rudeness” M. Thiers is almost the only one whom
the present generation may recognize without a good deal of reminding,
and indeed his hand is relatively light in delineating this personage
of few inches and many episodes. M. Thiers must have been dear to the
caricaturist, for he belonged to the type that was easy to “do;” it
being well known that these gentlemen appreciate public characters in
direct proportion to their saliency of feature. When faces are reducible
to a few telling strokes their wearers are overwhelmed with the honors
of publicity; with which, on the other hand, nothing is more likely to
interfere than the possession of a countenance neatly classical. Daumier
had only to give M. Thiers the face of a clever owl, and the trick was
played. Of course skill was needed to individualize the symbol, but that
is what caricaturists propose to themselves. Of how well he
succeeded the admirable plate of the lively little minister in a
“new dress”--tricked out in the uniform of a general of the First
Republic--is a sufficient illustration. The bird of night is not an
acute bird, but how the artist has presented the image of a selected
specimen! And with what a life-giving pencil the whole figure is put
on its feet, what intelligent drawing, what a rich, free stroke! The
allusions conveyed in it are to such forgotten things that it is strange
to think the personage was, only the other year, still contemporaneous;
that he might have been met, on a fine day, taking a few firm steps in
a quiet part of the Champs Élysées, with his footman carrying a second
overcoat and looking doubly tall behind him. In whatever attitude
Daumier depicts him, planted as a tiny boxing-master at the feet of the
virtuous colossus in a blouse (whose legs are apart, like those-of the
Rhodian), in whom the artist represents the People, to watch the match
that is about to come off between Ratapoil and M. Berryer, or even in
the act of lifting the “parricidal” club of a new repressive law to
deal a blow at the Press, an effulgent, diligent, sedentary muse (this
picture, by the way, is a perfect specimen of the simple and telling in
political caricature)--however, as I say, he takes M. Thiers, there is
always a rough indulgence in his crayon, as if he were grateful to him
for lending himself so well. He invented Ratapoil as he appropriated
Robert Macaire, and as a caricaturist he never fails to put into
circulation, when he can, a character to whom he may attribute as many
as possible of the affectations or the vices of the day. Robert Macaire,
an imaginative, a romantic rascal, was the hero of a highly successful
melodrama written for Frederick Lemaitre; but Daumier made him the
type of the swindler at large in an age of feverish speculation--the
projector of showy companies, the advertiser of worthless shares. There
is a whole series of drawings descriptive of his exploits, a hundred
masterly plates which, according to M. Champfleury, consecrated
Daumier’s reputation. The subject, the legend, was in most cases, still
according to M. Champfleury, suggested by Philipon. Sometimes it was
very witty; as for instance when Bertrand, the muddled acolyte or
scraping second fiddle of the hero, objects, in relation to a brilliant
scheme which he has just developed, with the part Bertrand is to play,
that there are constables in the country, and he promptly replies,
“Constables? So much the better--they’ll take the shares!” Ratapoil was
an evocation of the same general character, but with a difference of
_nuance_--the ragged political bully, or hand-to-mouth demagogue, with
the smashed tall hat, cocked to one side, the absence of linen, the club
half-way up his sleeve, the swagger and pose of being gallant for the
people. Ratapoil abounds in the promiscuous drawings that I have looked
over, and is always very strong and living, with a considerable element
of the sinister, so often in Daumier an accompaniment of the comic.
There is an admirable page--it brings the idea down to 1851--in which
a sordid but astute peasant, twirling his thumbs on his stomach and
looking askance, allows this political adviser to urge upon him in
a whisper that there is not a minute to lose--to lose for action, of
course--if he wishes to keep his wife, his house, his field, his heifer
and his calf. The canny scepticism in the ugly, half-averted face of the
typical rustic who considerably suspects his counsellor is indicated by
a few masterly strokes.
This is what the student of Daumier recognizes as his science, or, if
the word has a better grace, his art. It is what has kept life in his
work so long after so many of the occasions of it have been swept into
darkness. Indeed, there is no such commentary on renown as the “back
numbers” of a comic journal. They show us that at certain moments
certain people were eminent, only to make us unsuccessfully try to
remember what they were eminent _for_. And the comparative obscurity
(comparative, I mean, to the talent of the caricaturist) overtakes even
the most justly honored names. M. Berryer was a splendid speaker and a
public servant of real distinction and the highest utility; yet the fact
that to-day his name is on few men’s lips seems to be emphasized by this
other fact that we continue to pore over Daumier, in whose plates we
happen to come across him. It reminds one afresh how Art is an embalmer,
a magician, whom we can never speak too fair. People duly impressed with
this truth are sometimes laughed at for their superstitious tone, which
is pronounced, according to the fancy of the critic, mawkish, maudlin or
hysterical. But it is really difficult to see how any reiteration of
the importance of art can overstate the plain facts. It prolongs, it
preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. It conciliates,
charms, bribes posterity; and it murmurs to mortals, as the old French
poet sang to his mistress, “You will be fair only so far as I have said
so.” When it whispers even to the great, “You depend upon me, and I can
do more for you, in the long-run, than any one else,” it is scarcely too
proud. It puts method and power and the strange, real, mingled air
of things into Daumier’s black sketchiness, so full of the technical
_gras_, the “fat” which French critics commend and which we have no
word to express. It puts power above all, and the effect which he
best achieves, that of a certain simplification of the attitude or the
gesture to an almost symbolic generality. His persons represent only one
thing, but they insist tremendously on that, and their expression of it
abides with us, unaccompanied with timid detail. It may really be said
that they represent only one class--the old and ugly; so that there is
proof enough of a special faculty in his having played such a concert,
lugubrious though it be, on a single chord. It has been made a reproach
to him, says M. Grand-Carteret, that “his work is lacking in two capital
elements--_la jeunesse et la femme_;” and the commentator resents his
being made to suffer for the deficiency--“as if an artist could be at
the same time deep, comic, graceful and pretty; as if all those who have
a real value had not created for themselves a form to which they remain
confined and a type which they reproduce in all its variations, as soon
as they have touched the æsthetic ideal that has been their dream.
Assuredly humanity, as this great painter saw it, could not be
beautiful; one asks one’s self what maiden in her teens, a pretty face,
would have done in the midst of these good, plain folk, stunted and
elderly, with faces like wrinkled apples. A simple accessory most of
the time, woman is for him merely a termagant or a blue-stocking who has
turned the corner.”
When the eternal feminine, for Daumier appears in neither of these
forms he sees it in Madame Chaboulard or Madame Fribochon, the old
snuff-taking, gossiping portress, in a nightcap and shuffling _savates_,
relating or drinking in the wonderful and the intimate. One of his
masterpieces represents three of these dames, lighted by a guttering
candle, holding their heads together to discuss the fearful earthquake
at Bordeaux, the consequence of the government’s allowing the surface
of the globe to be unduly dug out in California. The representation of
confidential imbecility could not go further. When a man leaves out so
much of life as Daumier--youth and beauty and the charm of woman and the
loveliness of childhood and the manners of those social groups of
whom it may most be said that they _have_ manners--when he exhibits a
deficiency on this scale it might seem that the question was not to be
so easily disposed of as in the very non-apologetic words I have just
quoted. All the same (and I confess it is singular), we may feel what
Daumier omitted and yet not be in the least shocked by the claim of
predominance made for him. It is impossible to spend a couple of hours
over him without assenting to this claim, even though there may be a
weariness in such a panorama of ugliness and an inevitable reaction
from it. This anomaly, and the challenge to explain it which appears to
proceed from him, render him, to my sense, remarkably interesting. The
artist whose idiosyncrasies, whose limitations, if you will, make
us question and wonder, in the light of his fame, has an element
of fascination not attaching to conciliatory talents. If M. Eugene
Montrosier may say of him without scandalizing us that such and such
of his drawings belong to the very highest art, it is interesting (and
Daumier profits by the interest) to put one’s finger on the reason we
are not scandalized.
I think this reason is that, on the whole he is so peculiarly serious.
This may seem an odd ground of praise for a jocose draughtsman, and of
course what I mean is that his comic force is serious--a very different
thin from the absence of comedy. This essential sign of the caricaturist
may surely be anything it will so long as it is there. Daumier’s figures
are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened,
mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of
the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost
tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is
carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series
of “Le Public du Salon,” old classicists looking up, horrified and
scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have
an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier
reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is
the very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolute
bourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without poetic
ironies, to whom a big cracked mirror has been given. His thick, strong,
manly touch stands, in every way, for so much knowledge. He used to make
little images, in clay and in wax (many of them still exist), of
the persons he was in the habit of representing, so that they might
constantly seem to be “sitting” for him. The caricaturist of that day
had not the help of the ubiquitous photograph. Daumier painted actively,
as well, in his habitation, all dedicated to work, on the narrow island
of St. Louis, where the Seine divides and where the monuments of old
Paris stand thick, and the types that were to his purpose pressed close
upon him. He had not far to go to encounter the worthy man, in the
series of “Les Papas,” who is reading the evening paper at the café
with so amiable and placid a credulity, while his unnatural little boy,
opposite to him, finds sufficient entertainment in the much-satirized
_Constitutionnel_. The bland absorption of the papa, the face of the man
who believes everything he sees in the newspaper, is as near as Daumier
often comes to positive gentleness of humor. Of the same family is the
poor gentleman, in “Actualités,” seen, in profile, under a doorway where
he has taken refuge from a torrent of rain, who looks down at his neat
legs with a sort of speculative contrition and says. “To think of
my having just ordered two pairs of white trousers.” The _tout petit
bourgeois_ palpitates in both these sketches.
I must repeat that it is absurd to pick half a dozen at hazard, out of
five thousand; yet a few selections are the only way to call attention
to his strong drawing. This has a virtuosity of its own, for all
its hit-or-miss appearance. Whatever he touches--the nude, in the
swimming-baths on the Seine, the intimations of landscape, when his
_petits rentiers_ go into the suburbs for a Sunday--acquires relief and
character, Docteur Véron, a celebrity of the reign of Louis-Philippe,
a Mæcenas of the hour, a director of the opera, author of the _Mémoires
d’un Bourgeois de Paris_--this temporary “illustration,” who appears to
have been almost indecently ugly, would not be vivid to us to-day had
not Daumier, who was often effective at his expense, happened to have
represented him, in some crisis of his career, as a sort of naked
inconsolable Vitellius. He renders the human body with a cynical
sense of its possible flabbiness and an intimate acquaintance with its
structure. “Une Promenade Conjugale,” in the series of “Tout ce qu’on
voudra,” portrays a hillside, on a summer afternoon, on which a man has
thrown himself on his back to rest, with his arms locked under his head.
His fat, full-bosomed, middle-aged wife, under her parasol, with a bunch
of field-flowers in her hand, looks down at him patiently and seems to
say, “Come, my dear, get up.” There is surely no great point in this;
the only point is life, the glimpse of the little snatch of poetry in
prose. It is a matter of a few broad strokes of the crayon; yet the
pleasant laziness of the man, the idleness of the day, the fragment of
homely, familiar dialogue, the stretch of the field with a couple of
trees merely suggested, have a communicative truth.
I perhaps exaggerate all this, and in insisting upon the merit of
Daumier may appear to make light of the finer accomplishment of several
more modern talents, in England and France, who have greater ingenuity
and subtlety and have carried qualities of execution so, much further.
In looking at this complicated younger work, which has profited so by
experience and comparison, it is inevitable that we should perceive it
to be infinitely more cunning. On the other hand Daumier, moving in his
contracted circle, has an impressive depth. It comes back to his strange
seriousness. He is a draughtsman by race, and if he has not extracted
the same brilliancy from training, or perhaps even from effort and
experiment, as some of his successors, does not his richer satiric and
sympathetic feeling more than make up the difference?
However this question may be answered, some of his drawings belong to
the class of the unforgetable. It may be a perversity of prejudice,
but even the little cut of the “Connoisseurs,” the group of gentlemen
collected round a picture and criticising it in various attitudes
of sapience and sufficiency, appears to me to have the strength that
abides. The criminal in the dock, the flat-headed murderer, bending over
to speak to his advocate, who turns a whiskered, professional, anxious
head to caution and remind him. tells a large, terrible story and awakes
a recurrent shudder. We see the gray court-room, we feel the personal
suspense and the immensity of justice. The “Saltimbanques,” reproduced
in _L’Art_ for 1878, is a page of tragedy, the finest of a cruel
series. M. Eugène Montrosier says of it that “The drawing is masterly,
incomparably firm, the composition superb, the general impression quite
of the first order.” It exhibits a pair of lean, hungry mountebanks, a
clown and a harlequin beating the drum and trying a comic attitude
to attract the crowd, at a fair, to a poor booth in front of which a
painted canvas, offering to view a simpering fat woman, is suspended.
But the crowd doesn’t come, and the battered tumblers, with their
furrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in the void. The whole thing
is symbolic and full of grim-ness, imagination and pity. It is the sense
that we shall find in him, mixed with his homelier extravagances, an
element prolific in indications of this order that draws us back to
Daumier.