Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) Advice to a Young Artist Gift of Duncan Phillips

Daumier’s broad planes of deep, vibrant color and his roughly applied highlights struck most of his contemporaries as preposterously crude. His paintings were astonishingly daring for an era which looked for meretricious fidelity to nature in its pictures. Few could grasp the significance of his simple, massive forms or understand how his profound human sympathy made these forms expressive symbols of emotion. In this picture a mood, sympathetic and quiet, is established between the young man and his master as they discuss a sketch selected from the big portfolio.

For the eye sensitive to color and value, there is a remarkable satisfaction in Daumier’s choice of hues. How deftly he contrasts the cool, shadowed paper in the old man’s hands with the warm white of the sheets below, yet how nicely distinguished the grayish paper is from the gray smock of the young man! These cool hues reappear, echoed in the background, to climax in the blue portfolio which rests against the red couch. The starkly simple, brown-clad old man stands out against the cool colors about him. On his face a few details, boldly indicated in dark lines and planes of light, strengthen the picture’s emotional content. Such a composition has qualities analogous to the majestic movements of a symphony.

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Canvas. 16⅛ × 12⅞ inches Painted probably after 1860

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