"‘Strange Seriousness’: Discovering Daumier" by Roger Kimball, in The New Criterion (Apr. 2000), 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.

Honoré Daumier’s amusing and clever caricatures of lawyers, doctors, politicians, and other denizens of 19th-century Paris remain well known today. But his haunting paintings of Don Quixote and other subjects have been far less celebrated—at least until the recent hit exhibition of his works at the Phillips Collection, in Washington. Much the same discrepancy in response confronted Daumier (1808–79) during his life, observes Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion. "Time and again, he attempted to get his work as a painter taken seriously. The Salon was frosty, the public uninterested."

Daumier, who had little formal education, excelled at caricature—and "became its slave," Kimball says. His work for Charles Philipon’s Le Charivari and other satirical magazines "paid the bills, though barely." It also earned him, on one occasion, a sixmonth prison term. The king was not amused by Daumier’s famous lithograph Gargantua, showing a pear-headed Louis-Philippe perched on a commode, taking in the country’s treasure from its starving citizens, while excreting writs, honors, and ribbons for royal ministers and favorites.

"There is plenty to admire in Daumier’s caricatures," says Kimball. "But his paintings... exist in an entirely different spiritual and aesthetic register." They have, as novelist Henry James commented, a "strange seriousness." A few have religious themes, Kimball notes, but "his best paintings—some family scenes, Third-Class Carriage (1862–64), The Uprising (1852–58), The Fugitives (1865–70), and several paintings of Don Quixote—are secular. Nevertheless, they possess rare depths of solitude and melancholy tenderness."

In 1878, when Daumier was blind and one year from death, several friends organized a large retrospective at a gallery in Paris. By then, his oeuvre included nearly 300 paintings, along with thousands of caricatures. Although Daumier could not attend, the exhibition—"carefully designed," Kimball says, "to highlight Daumier’s achievements as a serious painter"—was "a great moment" for him. At long last his paintings were being recognized. "The show was a rousing critical success," writes Kimball. But "the masses whom Daumier had pleased, goaded, and amused for decades stayed away en masse."