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Before the Hearing [Avant l’Audience]

Honoré Daumier

Unframed size: Not available

$200.00

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About the work

Commentary on lawyers, judges, and justice in superb Daumier fashion. Honoré Daumier famously satirized France’s justice system and exposed the misery of the masses through the emerging medium of lithography. Caricatures of government officials endeared him to the public, although one-too-many scathing renderings of King Louis-Philippe also landed him six months in prison. In this lithograph, one man says to the other, “Listen, dear colleague, you will be pleading against me today the exact case I pled three weeks against you . . . isn’t that funny!” The other replies, “And I will reply to you in your own words. This is really great. In case of need, we can prompt each other”! This is Plate 14 from the “Les Gens de Justice” series, published by the Le Charivari news magazine on October 13, 1845, from Daumier’s stone number 805.

Copies of this work are held by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the famous Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries collection, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Brandeis University library, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art, and many others.

Because we are unable to authenticate this wotk, we are selling it as After Daumier.

Matted but unframed. Framing is available at modest additional cost.