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Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879)
Presumed po…
See original version (French)
287
-
Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879)
Presumed po…
See original version (French)
Estimate €4,000 - €6,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879)
Presumed portrait-charge of Portalis
Small bust in polychrome clay.
Two labels on the back, one with the inscription "h. Daumier".
Height: 13.5 cm
Minor accidents and small missing parts
Height 12.5 cm.
Provenance: Norman collection.
Attributed to Daumier. Presumed caricature of Count Portalis. Polychrome clay.
Related literature: Edouard Papet, "Daumier: les célébrités du Juste milieu, 1832-1835: étude et restauration", cat. exp., Paris, Musée d'Orsay, 25 May-28 August 2005, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005.
Between 1832 and 1835, at the request of the publisher Charles Philipon, founder of La Caricature and Le Charivari, Honoré Daumier modelled a series of small clay busts painted in oil caricaturing political figures from the early years of the July Monarchy: members of parliament, ministers, magistrates, all more or less close to a regime that the satirical press referred to contemptuously as the "Juste Milieu". These effigies served as models for the artist's lithographs. Their original number remains unknown. Only thirty-six have survived, preserved since 1980 at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, after having been bought in 1927 from Charles Philipon's grandson by the art publisher Maurice Le Garrec, who had them restored and moulded because of their extreme fragility before publishing them in bronze and plaster.
The present bust is therefore part of this production. The presumed identification of the model is based on a methodical comparison with the catalogue raisonné of the lithographed work drawn up by Hazard and Delteil (1904): of the sixty-three caricatures devoted to people of justice, only one subject has all the characteristic features of this effigy: black hair covering the entire skull, tubercular nose, rounded cheeks, chin drooping under the magistrate's robe. It is Joseph-Marie Portalis (1778-1858), son of the father of the Civil Code, former Minister of Religious Affairs, then First President of the Court of Cassation from 1829 to 1852, portrayed full-length by Daumier in La Caricature of 3 July 1835.
The date of this lithograph highlights the political significance of this portrait. In July 1835, Portalis was one of the assessors in the Chamber of Peers investigating the April Trials, the proceedings brought against republicans following the insurrection of 1834, during which the massacre in the Rue Transnonain cost the lives of innocent civilians. This judicial repression, which Daumier had stigmatised in his famous lithograph "Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834", earned the magistrates who became its instruments the target of his verve. Daumier's caricature of Portalis was more than just a caricature of a face: it was an indictment in clay of the servants of an orderly judiciary.
In the absence of an exhaustive list of his portrait-charges during Daumier's lifetime, and with these reservations about attribution and identification, the bust is nonetheless a first-rate visual testimony to a creative practice - sculpture as a laboratory for caricature - that made these fragile terracottas one of the most singular ensembles in nineteenth-century art.
Aymeric Rouillac
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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