Ten Lithographs by Honoré Daumier
Lithography begins with a stone: the artist draws directly on smooth limestone, and thousands of prints are pulled from it. Honoré Daumier worked with such stones for thirty years, satirizing the July Monarchy. For "Gargantua," he was imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie, and after "Rue Transnonain," the government bought up the prints and destroyed the stone itself. Ten of his sheets, from the pear-shaped Louis-Philippe to the Bonapartist scoundrel Ratapoil, demonstrate how a cheap newspaper image became both a weapon and an art form.