Honore Daumier - The Chess Players
For much of his career, Honore Daumier was more famous as a draughtsman and caricaturist than as a painter.
He prolifically created satirical drawings of political figures for many of the up and coming periodicals in France. And in fact, in 1831, one of his caricatures of King Louis Philip was deemed so insulting, it landed Daumier with a prison sentence. (Something which, if anything, gained him even more popularity among certain segments of the French public during this tumultuous political period in the country!)
However, while Daumier’s drawings remained popular throughout his life (despite the man himself always living in relative poverty) - towards his latter years, his fiercest critics finally started to take his paintings much more seriously.
And with the intense drama he achieves in our featured work today - we can see why.
Here, Daumier makes a simple chess game seem like a matter of life or death; with our older figure to the right gripping tightly to the table, as if every inch of him is straining to find a way out of the trap his younger counterpart seems to have set for him. (A kind of tension which I’m sure will be familiar to many of you who may also be keen chess players!)
But perhaps it is not just the tenseness of the figures which makes this piece so gripping - rather, it is the way Daumier paints with these heavy, sculptural brush strokes which really draws us in here too.
Despite his fading eyesight at the time of creating this work - there is a hint of Chiaroscuro here; revealing Daumier’s admiration for the likes of Caravaggio, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and the Black paintings of Francisco Goya (often known as “the last of the old masters”).
Yet, at the same time, there is a modernity too; and a kind of “dark impressionism” - which would go on to have a profound impact on the likes of Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh.
(Indeed, Vincent regularly wrote of his admiration for Daumier while working on his some of his earliest masterpieces including the Potato Eaters.)
So, while Daumier is not quite as famous now as some of his other 19th century contemporaries - in many ways, he remains the quintessential “Artist’s artist”. And incidentally, it was not just fellow painters who would come to hold his work in such high regard.
For example, the legendary writer Honore de Balzac once claimed Daumier had “a touch of the Michelangelo” in him.
While the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that he considered Daumier “One of the most important men, not only, I would say, in caricature, but also in modern art.”
Thus, whenever we take a moment to admire Daumier’s unique skill as a painter . . . we are certainly in good company!
p.s . . . For anyone curious to see the caricature that landed Daumier in prison . . .
Thanks for posting the caricature and saving me a google search! Along with these paintings, it’s pretty great.
Ahhhh, I love Daumier. Incidentally, I’m sure you know that they started depicting him as a pear to avoid the censorship; he sort of resembled a pear . Love the paintings of his you chose today, and thank you for highlighting a man who I feel is a bit overlooked!