DAUMIER, Honoré

Variétés Drolatiques [bound with] Histoire Ancienne

Paris: Léopold Pannier et Cie., 1841. Item #04953

One Hundred Masterpieces by Honoré Daumier
Two Exceptionally Rare Complete Albums Bound Together
One Hundred Superb Lithographs Satirizing Parisian Life and the Classical World

DAUMIER, Honoré, illustrator. Variétés Drolatiques. Paris: Léopold Pannier et Cie., [1841].

First collected edition. Folio (13 3/16 x 10 inches; 335 x 254 mm.).

Publisher Léopold Pannier gathered together seven of Daumier's finest humorous series into a single album comprising fifty lithographs:

Vulgarités (10 plates, complete)
Les Musiciens de Paris (6 plates, complete)
Proverbes de Famille (2 plates, complete)
Proverbes et Maximes (12 plates, complete)
La Pêche (7 plates, complete)
La Journée du Célibataire (12 plates, complete)
Les Saltimbanques (1 plate, as issued in the album)

A total of fifty lithographs.

As noted by the Daumier Register: "Pannier published a separate album with the title Variétés Drolatiques… containing seven complete series… bringing the total number of prints to fifty. This album can be considered rare."

Far scarcer than the individual lithographs themselves, this publisher's album represents one of the earliest attempts to preserve Daumier's celebrated caricatures in collected form. The seven suites encompass every aspect of Parisian life - from domestic quarrels and bachelorhood to musicians, fishermen, itinerant entertainers, and the comic absurdities of bourgeois society. Together they provide an extraordinary survey of Daumier's mature genius during the early years of the July Monarchy.

Institutionally the album is exceptionally elusive. OCLC records only three individual plates from Proverbes et Maximes in public collections, while we have located only a single complete copy appearing at auction, sold between October 1898 and July 1899. Even the celebrated Armand Hammer Collection includes only a single plate from La Pêche.

Bound with Histoire Ancienne Daumier's Brilliant Satire on Classical Antiquity

DAUMIER, Honoré, illustrator. PHILIPON, Charles. Histoire Ancienne. Paris: Chez Aubert, [1841–1843].

Complete with fifty lithographed plates.

Together the two works comprise one hundred superb lithographs.

Contemporary quarter dark brown morocco over marbled boards, spine with four raised bands, ruled in blind and lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. A near fine, complete example.

One of Daumier's most original and intellectually ambitious achievements, Histoire Ancienne transforms the heroes and gods of Greece and Rome into recognizably nineteenth-century Parisians. Achilles, Ulysses, Hercules, Jupiter, and countless other classical figures are stripped of their heroic grandeur and recast as vain bourgeois, comic bureaucrats, quarrelsome husbands, and pretentious social climbers.

Published between 1841 and 1843, the series formed part of the Romantic assault upon academic Classicism then dominating French art and literature. Charles Philipon's witty accompanying texts contain numerous veiled political references to the reign of King Louis-Philippe, making the series not merely humorous but a sophisticated exercise in social and political satire.

Among the finest plates are: Le Baptême d'Achille, in which the infant Achilles is plunged into the Styx with comic domestic realism rather than epic grandeur.

La Mère des Gracques, perhaps the best-known image in the series, where the famous Roman matron proudly presents her boisterous children as her "only jewels," allowing Daumier to transform an episode from Plutarch into a scene from contemporary Parisian family life.

Complete copies are extraordinarily uncommon. We have located only a single institutional example worldwide, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Bound together, these two remarkable albums contain one hundred original lithographs spanning every facet of Daumier's genius - from the comic theater of everyday Parisian existence to his devastating reinterpretation of the ancient world. Few nineteenth-century caricature albums combine such artistic brilliance, historical importance, and genuine rarity.

An exceptional opportunity to acquire two of the master's most elusive and complete lithographic series in a handsome contemporary binding.

Price: $24,500.00