467 - Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)
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Estimate €4,000 - €6,000

Description

Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879) Presumed caricature of Portalis Small polychrome terracotta bust. Two labels on the back, one bearing the inscription ‘h. Daumier’. Height: 13.5 cm Minor damage and small losses Height: 12.5 cm. Provenance: a collection in Normandy. Attributed to Daumier. Presumed caricature of Count Portalis. Polychrome clay. Related literature: Edouard Papet, “Daumier: the celebrities of the Juste milieu, 1832–1835: study and restoration”, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 25 May–28 August 2005, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005. DAUMIER’S TERRACOTTA WORKS 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 busts in raw clay, painted in oil, caricaturing the political figures of the early years of the July Monarchy: MPs, ministers, magistrates, all more or less aligned with a regime that the satirical press derisively referred to as the ‘Juste Milieu’. The artist used these effigies as models for his lithographs. The original number of such works remains unknown. Only thirty-six have survived to the present day, and have been held at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris since 1980, after being purchased in 1927 from Charles Philipon’s grandson by the art dealer Maurice Le Garrec, who had them restored and cast due to their extreme fragility before producing bronze and plaster editions. This bust would therefore form part of that body of work. The presumed identification of the model is based on a methodical comparison with the lithographed catalogue raisonné of the work compiled by Hazard and Delteil (1904): among the sixty-three caricatures devoted to members of the judiciary, only one subject combines the characteristic features of this effigy: black hair covering the entire skull, a bulbous nose, plump cheeks, and a chin that falls below the magistrate’s robe. This is believed to be Joseph-Marie Portalis (1778–1858), son of the father of the Civil Code, former Minister for Religious Affairs, and subsequently First President of the Court of Cassation from 1829 to 1852, depicted full-length by Daumier in *La Caricature* of 3 July 1835. The date of this lithograph sheds light on the political significance of this portrait. In July 1835, Portalis sat among the assessors of the Chamber of Peers hearing the ‘April trials’—the prosecutions brought against Republicans following the 1834 insurrection, during which the massacre on Rue Transnonain had claimed the lives of innocent civilians. This judicial repression, which Daumier had condemned in his famous lithograph ‘Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834’, meant that the magistrates who acted as its instruments became, in turn, the targets of his wit. In satirising Portalis, Daumier did not merely caricature a face: he fashioned an indictment in clay against the servants of a justice system that took its orders from above. Although no exhaustive list of his caricature portraits was compiled during Daumier’s lifetime, and despite these reservations regarding attribution and identification, the bust nonetheless constitutes a visual testament of the highest order: that of a creative practice, in which sculpture served as a laboratory for caricature, transforming these fragile pieces of raw clay into one of the most distinctive bodies of work in nineteenth-century art.

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Auction time 09/18/2026 at 2:00 PM

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467 - Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879) See original version (French)

467 - Attributed to Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)
See original version (French)