Honoré-Victorin Daumier,
French 1808-1879-
Don Quixote on horseback;
pen and brown ink on paper, signed with initials 'h.D' (lower right), 21 x 17 cm.
Provenance:
as recorded in the Daumier Register, the collection of Count Z. Myzielski.
as recorded in the Daumier Register, the collection of Harry J. Spiro, USA.
Private Collection, UK.
Literature:
Maison, K.E., Honoré Daumier: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, vol. 2 (Greenwich, Conn., 1968), plate 143.
Laughton, Bruce, The Drawings of Daumier and Millet (New Haven and London, 1991), p. 183, 1991.
Daumier Register online, no.10422.
Note:
Daumier was a renowned painter, draughtsman and caricaturist, known for his humorous though also often poignant and realistic portrayals of life in nineteenth-century France. While best known, both during his lifetime and after, for his politically and socially critical cartoons, which were widely circulated in magazines such as Le Charivari and La Caricature, Daumier also achieved some acclaim among his own circle as a painter, with the writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) remarking: "there is a lot of Michelangelo in that fellow." A multifaceted artist, Daumier also worked in the medium of sculpture, and a number of his painted clay caricature busts of politicians and society figures are in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, where many of the artist's sketches are also held.
Daumier appears to have been fascinated by the literary subject of Don Quixote and often turned to Miguel de Cervantes' early 17th-century epic novel for inspiration, creating over sixty drawings and paintings featuring Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza roaming the Spanish plains.
The Daumier Register compares the present drawing to a number of other known examples, including one recorded in the Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection (Los Angels CA, accession no. AH.1990.1.4588). Daumier also shows Don Quixote in a similar pose in several of his paintings, such as the one in the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (A I 976), in which the literary hero is accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza. The Daumier Register describes how in these works 'we see a difficult descent, in which Don Quixote is carefully leading his horse down a steep hill.'
Estim. 10,000 - 15,000 GBP
