I scribbled basic pencil sketches of the ones I thought most interesting and bought postcards of anything on the list. Later, compiling this in an A4 folder to hand in to our teacher, I realised that while the postcards reproduced the paintings much more accurately than my sketches, they didn’t always convey their effect. On my sketch of Monet’s Water Lilies, I added little stick figures of people in the National Gallery, to get across that it took up a whole, enormous wall. I got extra marks for that.
It was also interesting to see which paintings I’d thought worth sketching had or hadn’t been selected for reproduction as postcards. Portraits of single individuals and landscapes of real places tended to get reproduced. Odder, more interesting stuff tended not to. In the Courtauld Institute, I bought two postcards of a painting that particularly spoke to me — one for my homework project and one for my bedroom wall. I couldn’t say at the time what it was about Don Quixote and Sancho Pancha (c. 1870-72) by Honoré Daumier that so held my attention. I’ve thought about it a lot since.
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| Honoré Victorin Daumier, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c. 1868-72, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust). Image courtesy of the Courtauld. |
For one thing, it’s an unfinished painting, the work of an old artist in the process of going blind. That may account for the murky, dream-like quality and the half-formed figures — an impressionistically gaunt Quixote and his horse. Yet this crude, skeletal figure sits tall and proud, shoulders back, form in total contrast to the execution. If you know the story (I think I learned it after first seeing this painting), you’ll know Quixote is a fantasist, convinced he’s on an epic, noble quest. The posture here is his delusion.
Beside him, Sancho Panzo is a heftier silhouette, a little slumped upon the silhouette of a donkey. We get a sense of these two contrasting characters from this barest outline. They are dwarfed by the high, steep, dark terrain behind them, for all they are so prominent in the composition. But on they stride — Quixote proudly, Sancho with reservation — into the light.
I must have bought Sarah Symmons’ 2004 book on Daumier around the time it was published. Reading it again, I’m amazed by how prolific he was, producing some 4,000 lithographs, 1,000 woodcuts, 800 drawings and watercolours, 300 paintings and 50 pieces of sculpture. From this, Symmons calculates an extraordinary pace:
“Daumier completed a new work every two or three days of his adult life, except for the last three or four years when he was blind” (p. 22)
Even so, we might query that word “completed”; he was notorious for not finishing work. Also extraordinary is Symmons tracing what Daumier was probably paid, not least for his lithograph work for Parisian magazines. He was, at least at times, on good money — and yet frequently poor and more than once bankrupt (p. 10). Sadly, there seems to be little surviving in the way of contemporary sources to explain this discrepancy.
Again, I query the choice of words when Symmons says,
“His subject matter was limited to human activity,” (p. 16)
I think it would be better to say “focused on”. As she says, the vast majority of his work has striking figures in the foreground, no middle-ground and then a background at some distance. The effect is like a tableau, or portrait mode on a phone camera.
Daumier was influenced by a range of other artists — his contemporaries, classical sculpture, Goya and Rembrandt. Symmons says Rembrandt had a particular effect on him from the late 1850s,
“after several new masterpieces by the Dutch artist were acquired by Napoleon III” (p. 99).
Presumably, these pieces were exhibited and Daumier went to see them. But I wonder how he — and other artists — accessed such works more generally. How much were they influenced by reproductions in print rather than the real thing? Basically, to what extend did Daumier learn and develop his craft through the equivalent of postcards?
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