1808-1879 French Honore Daumier Locations In some 40 years of political and social commentary Honore Daumier created an enormously rich and varied record of Parisian middle-class life in the form of nearly 4,000 lithographs, about 1,000 wood engravings, and several hundred drawings and paintings. In them the comic spirit of Moli??re comes to life once again. After having been the scourge of Louis Philippe and the July Monarchy (1830-1848), Daumier continued as a satirist of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (1851-1870). Poor himself, the artist sympathized with the struggling bourgeois and proletarian citizens of Paris. As a man of the left, he battled for the establishment of a republic, which finally came in 1870. Liberals have always applauded Daumier; some conservatives, however, have been inclined to consider him woolly-minded. Honore Daumier, born on Feb. 26, 1808, in Marseilles, was the son of a glazier. When Honore was 6, the family moved to Paris, where the elder Daumier hoped to win success as a poet. Honore grew up in a home in which humanistic concerns had some importance. A born draftsman and designer who was largely self-taught, he received some formal instruction from Alexandre Lenoir, one of Jacques Louis David students. An obscure artist named Ramelet taught Daumier the elements of the new, inexpensive, and popular technique of lithography. Daumier style is so much his own that it is not easy to disentangle influences from other artists. Rembrandt and Francisco Goya are usually mentioned, along with Peter Paul Rubens, the Venetian school, and photography.  Related Paintings of Honore Daumier :. | The Washer woman | Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa | The Republic | Don Quixote and Sancho Panza | The Melodrama (mk09) |
Related Artists:
Francois-Rene Moreaux
painted Announcement of Independence in 1844
CARRACCI, Annibale
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1560-1609 Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, brother of Agostino Carracci. Since his lifetime, he has been considered one of the greatest Italian painters of his age. His masterpiece, the ceiling (1597-1601) of the Galleria Farnese, Rome, merges a vibrant naturalism with the formal language of classicism in a grand and monumental style.
Kitagawa Utamaro
Japanese 1753-1806 Kitagawa Utamaro Gallery Biographical details for Utamaro are extremely limited, and each reference gives a substantially different account. Various accounts claim that he was born in either Edo (present-day Tokyo), Kyoto, or Osaka (the three main cities of Japan), or a provincial town (no one is sure exactly which one) in around 1753; the exact date is also uncertain. Another long-standing tradition has is that he was born in Yoshiwara, the courtesan district of Edo, the son of a tea-house owner, but there is no evidence of this. His original name was Kitagawa Ichitaro. It is generally agreed that he became a pupil of the painter Toriyama Sekien while he was still a child, and there are many authorities who believe that Utamaro was his son as well. He lived in Sekien's house while he was growing up, and the relationship continued until Sekien's death in 1788. Sekien was originally trained in the aristocratic Kan?? school of painting, but in middle age he started to lean toward the popular (or ukiyo-e) school. Sekien is known to have had a number of other pupils, none of any distinction. Utamaro, in common with other Japanese of the time, changed his name as he became mature, and also took the name Ichitaro Yusuke as he became older. He apparently also married, although little is known about his wife, and he apparently had no children. His first major professional artistic work, at about the age of 22, in 1775, seems to have been the cover for a Kabuki playbook, under the g?? of Toyoaki. He then produced a number of actor and warrior prints, along with theatre programmes, and other such material. From the spring of 1781, he switched his g?? to Utamaro, and started painting and designing fairly forgettable woodblock prints of women. At some point in the middle 1780s, probably 1783, he went to live with the young rising publisher Tsutaya J??zabur??, with whom he apparently lived for about 5 years. He seems to have become a principal artist for the Tsutaya firm. His output of prints for the next few years was sporadic, as he produced mostly illustrations for books of kyoka, literally 'crazy verse', a parody of the classical waka form. He seems to have produced nothing at all that has survived in the period 1790-1792. In about 1791 Utamaro gave up designing prints for books and concentrated on making half-length single portraits of women, rather than the prints of women in groups favoured by other ukiyo-e artists. In 1793 he achieved recognition as an artist, and his semi-exclusive arrangement with the publisher Tsutaya J??zabur?? was terminated. He then went on to produce a number of very famous series, all featuring women of the Yoshiwara district. Over the years, he also occupied himself with a number of volumes of nature studies and shunga, or erotica. In 1797, Tsutaya J??zabur?? died, and Utamaro apparently was very upset by the loss of his long-time friend and supporter. Some commentators feel that his work after this never reached the heights it did before. In 1804, at the height of his success, he ran into legal trouble by publishing prints related to a banned historical novel. The prints, entitled Hideyoshi and his 5 Concubines, depicted the military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi's wife and concubines; Consequently, he was accused of insulting Hideyoshi's dignity. He was sentenced to be handcuffed for 50 days (some accounts say he was briefly imprisoned). According to some sources, the experience crushed him emotionally and ended his career as an artist. He died two years later, on the 20th day of the 9th month, 1806, aged about fifty-three, in Edo.