| In scene four of The Glass Menagerie, tension exists between Tom and Amanda after an argument in which Tom refers to his mother as an "[...]ugly -- babbling old -- witch..." (William 24). At one point, Williams makes a reference to Daumier to describe the facial expression of Amanda: As Tom comes listlessly for his coffee, she turns her back to him and stands rigidly facing the window on the gloomy gray vault of the areaway. Its light on her face with its aged but childish features is cruelly sharp, satirical as a Daumier print. (29) Daumier was a “[f]rench caricaturist, painter, and sculptor. In his lifetime he was known chiefly as a political and social satirist, but since his death recognition of his qualities as a painter has grown… “In 1830, after learning the still fairly new process of lithography, he began to contribute political cartoons to the anti-government weekly Caricature. He was an ardant Republican and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1832 for his attacks on Louis-Philippe, whom he represented as `Gargantua swallowing bags of gold extorted from the people'. On the suppression of political satire in 1835 he began to work for Charivari and turned to satire of social life, but at the time of the 1848 revolution he returned to political subjects. He is said to have made more than 4,000 lithographs, wishing each time that the one he had just made could be his last. In the last years of his life he was almost blind and was saved from destitution by Corot… “In the directness of his vision and the lack of sentimentality with which he depicts current social life Daumier belongs to the Realist school of which Courbet was the chief representative. As a caricaturist he stands head and shoulders above all others of the 19th-century. He had the gift of expressing the whole character of a man through physiognomy, and the essence of his satire lay in his power to interpret mental folly in terms of physical absurdity. Although he never made a commercial success of his art, he was appreciated by the discriminating and numbered among his friends and admirers Delacroix, Corot, Forain, and Baudelaire. Degas was among the artists who collected his works.” “Daumier, Honore.” Webmuseum, Paris. 6 Jan. 2004 <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/daumier/>. |
| Honore Daumier 1801-1879 |
| Examples of Daumier's Caricatures "Prussia Introducing the New National Assembly to France" "This Has Killed That" |