Vintage 1940s Honoré Daumier "Third Class Carriage" Art Print Folio

A dramatic print of Third Class Carriage by Honoré Daumier (French School—1808-1879) tipped into its own thick portfolio with information and provenance of the work enclosed. Folio is made of thick vintage textured paper with a lovely patina.

10" x 13"

DAuMIER came of poor folk. The son of a glazier, he had no formal education, artistic or otherwise. His elementary school and his university were the streets of Paris, the law courts where he worked as usher and errand boy, a lithog rapher's studio, and the Louvre. There is something wonderfully exciting about the thought of this proletarian kid, destined some day to become the great Daumier, wandering into the Louvre to look at the pictures and being drawn instinctively to the paintings of Rembrandt and the sculptures of Michelangelo.

He began to draw at the age of seven, seems always to have modeled in clay or wax, and by the time he was twenty-three was a staff artist on a radical paper.

Some four thousand lithographs in the next forty years earned him a wide contemporary reputation as a humorist and social satirist and immortality as one of the greatest draftsmen of all time. In his forties, he began to paint in oils. The best artists of his time, and writers like Hugo, Balzac and Baudelaire, recognized his genius, but the official art circles would have none of him.

Desperately poor, his eyesight nearly gone, he spent his last years in a little house in the country, and even this would have been taken away from him if his friend, the good Corot, had not secretly bought the place and deeded it to him.

Daumier's models were the people of Paris; his canvas, as big as humanity. A washerwoman and her child, workmen, beggars, actors, the legal charlatans people going about their daily business, enmeshed in the mysterious cocoon of themselves such were his models, and it is a miracle how he combined formal excellence with human compassion to portray them, and through them, all suffering mankind. He painted several versions of Third Class Carriage, one of the best of which is to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.