Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

Honore-Victorin Daumier
Marseille 1808-1879 Valmondois
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La Défense; The Defence
Pen and black and red ink and two shades of grey wash. Signed: h Daumier.
194 x 239 mm. (7 5 /8 x 9 3 /8 in.)
Provenance: Emile Strauss, Paris (bears label on old backing: Chenue, emballeur…/ Emile Straus/ l’avocat
à la barre); Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 3 rd -4 th June 1929, lot 4, ill. (150,000 frs.); With M. Knoedler & Co.
Inc., New York (label on old backing with title: Le Defenseur à la Barre); Mrs. Jean Alexander, New York;
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 14 th May 1986, lot 109.; with Richard Thune.; The Hon. Ronald Lauder, New
York; Anonymous sale Christie’s New York, 5 th May 1998, lot 2.
Literature: E. Klossowski, Honoré Daumier, Munich, 1923, p. 100, no. 163; “Auktionsnachrichten”,
Kunst und Kunstler, XXVII, 1929, p. 370 (listed as Der Verteidiger); E. Fuchs, Der Maler Daumier (Nachtrag-
Supplement), Munich, 1930, p. 65, no. 320c.; K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier. Catalogue raisonné of the
Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours, London, 1967, II, no. 667, pl. 255.; Daumier 1808-1879, exhibition
catalogue, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada and elsewhere, 1999-2000, p. 447, no. 289.
Exhibited: Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Peintures, aquarelles, dessins et lithographies des maîtres français
de la caricature et de la peinture de moeurs au XIXe sicle, 1888, no. 391 (titled La Plaidoirie, with framed
dimensions); Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Daumier, May 1901, p. 48, no. 274.
Lawyers and characters of the Parisian court system constitute one of Daumier’s most consistent bodies of work.
In Paris his family lived opposite the Palais de Justice and the young Daumier used to visit the court and sketch
the figures that populated it. Between 1832 and 1833 the artist spent six months in prison as a result of having
caricatured King Louis-Philippe. This personal experience with the French judicial system inspired him to visit the
courts more often afterwards, and for three years he amassed drawings and sketches of scenes from the tribunals
that he re-used for more finished compositions later in his career when he began to work for Charivari magazine
which published his lithographs and especially the series Les Gents de Justice (1845-8) and Physionomies du Palais
de Justice (1852). When in the 1860s the artist’s contract with Charivari was interrupted, Daumier concentrated
on executing drawings for connoisseurs and collectors whose demand for these subjects was very strong. The
French art critic and novelist Champfleury, a keen supporter of the work of Daumier, whom he repeatedly praised
in his writings, is recorded as asking the artist, on behalf of a friend, for two drawings of tribunal scenes 1 . The
present work, dated to the years 1864-5, belongs to the category of such highly finished and polished drawings
and watercolours which were generally executed for the market. These were the years, as was described by
Maison, “when his genius as a draughtsman was at its zenith” 2 and Daumier executed the finest of the series of
Court Scenes, Third Class Carriages and Don Quixote. The composition of the present drawing recalls that of the
lithograph Je crois vous avoir suffisamment prouvé ..., published in Charivari in 1864, in which a lawyer is shown
defending a man whose wife has repeatedly betrayed him. In the present drawing, the lawyer stands in the center,
overshadowing the humble client who sits next to him, his gaze concentrated, his face almost mask-like with
anxiety. Three judges sit in a line in the background, stern and implacable. The lawyer is shown pointing both
index figures at the table on which sit the symbols of his profession: a black hat, representing the power given to
him by the profession, and some papers likely to contain proof of his client’s defence. As Colta Ives has written,
“these figures finally represent for us neither lawyers nor judges, but personifications of human weakness dressed
up in dark robes” 3 . A pun is concealed in a small detail of the drawing where he translates the French saying
“brasser du vent” (hot air) by depicting a cloud in front of his open mouth with a little touch of white bodycolour.
A related unfinished sketch with a very similar composition also entitled The Defence and dated circa 1865 is
in the Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London, but there the defendant appears as an even more
desperate individual to whom the lawyer turns, taking his hand and pointing out a painting hanging over the
judges at their bench 4 . Emile Strauss (1844-1929), who seems to have been the first to own this drawing, was
himself a lawyer. He was an acquaintance of the Rothschild family and best known for having married Geneviève
Halévy, previously the wife of the composer Georges Bizet, and “grande Salonnière” of her time.
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