The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 99

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founded in 1648 (see chapter 21). Exhibiting work at the
Salonwas a sign of royal favor and a sure path to success.
Held annually during the eighteenth century at the palace
of the Louvre, the juried exhibitions were public events
that ran for weeks, attracting huge crowds, including newly
minted art critics. Paintings were exhibited from floor to
ceiling, taking up all the available space, and printed cata-
logues accompanied the exhibition. By the mid-nine-
teenth century these annual government-sponsored juried
exhibitions, held in large commercial halls, had become
symbols of entrenched, academic tastes. Daumier’s litho-
graphs satirized the Salonas a “grand occasion” attended by
hoards of gaping urbanites.

The ancestors of modern-day political cartoons,

Daumier’s lithographsconveyed his bitter opposition to the

monarchy, political corruption, and profiteering. Such crit-

icism courted danger, especially since in mid nineteenth-

century France it was illegal to caricature individuals

publicly without first obtaining their permission. Following

the publication of his 1831 lithograph, which depicted the

French king Louis Philippe as an obese Gargantua atop a

commode/throne from which he defecated bags of gold,

Daumier spent six months in jail.

Primarily a graphic artist, Daumier completed fewer than

three hundred paintings. In The Third-Class Carriage, he

captured on canvas the shabby monotony of nineteenth-

Figure 30.15 HONORE DAUMIER, Free Admission Day—Twenty-Five Degrees of Heatfrom the

series “Le Public du Salon,” published in Le Charivari(May 17, 1852), p. 10. Lithograph. 111 ⁄ 8  85 ⁄ 8 in.

The inscription reads “A day when one does not pay. Twenty-five degrees celsius.”