Given what happened to Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier, it is perhaps unsurprising that his more famous son Honoré (1808–79) became such a passionate skewerer of French elites. Jean-Baptiste had travelled from Provençal to Paris to impress Louis XVIII as a court poet, but his failure to win the king’s favour precipitated a tailspin that led to his confinement and eventual death at Charenton asylum. Against this backdrop of disillusionment Honoré was forced to seek work at the age of 13 and took a job as a bailiff’s messenger boy; but he had also trained under a student of Jacques-Louis David, and applied his worldly eye and his skill as a draughtsman to lithographs and cartoons. This show at the Albertina in Vienna focuses on his satirical prints and drawings, which often rubbed the censors up the wrong way – Gargantua (1832), an unflattering portrait of King Louis Philippe, earned Daumier a six-month prison sentence. The works on display teem with dynamic lines, memorable physiognomic detail and a strong sense of social justice (6 February–25 May).
Find out more from the Albertina’s website.
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