Art History Essay- Social Realism in the 19th century

He often worked using lithography, a print making technique in which he drew directly on the surface of a lithographic stone. In his cartoons and caricatures he used satire and humour to attack injustice. One of the noticeable characteristics of his work is his use of exaggerated facial features. His paintings however showed the same themes of exposing injustices but his approach was less simple and focused more on realistic representation of both colour and form. Rue Transnonain (1834) is an example of Daumier's lithography that portrays great social injustice. It shows a family lying murdered in a bedroom-a father in his nightshirt and nightcap laying on the body of his child with a female figure in the shadows on the left and the head of an old man projecting into the picture at the right. The Rue Transnonain was a street in Paris inhabited by workers who were suspected of participation in the disorders of the Republican Revolt in 1834. When it was fired on from an apartment, the civil guard broke in and shot the inhabitants, innocent or guilty. Unlike Neoclassicist painters such as David who would have idealized the figures in the scene as much as possible, Daumier shows the grossness of the scene in a realistic way, without drama. Honoré Daumier was deeply interested in people, especially the underprivileged. In The Third-Class Carriage (1860-63) he shows us, with great compassion, a group of people on a train journey. We are especially concerned with one family group, the young peasant mother tenderly holding her small child, the weary grandmother lost in her own thoughts, and the young boy fast asleep. The sheer subject matter of this work made it controversial. The fact that Daumier believed that peasants were worthy of being painted seemed strange to other people. Daumier paints these displaced people with a sense of affection, and it is clear that he is sympathetic of these people and believes that the injustices towards them are wrong.