Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) is best known as the nimble caricaturist of French politics and the habits of the bourgeoisie. The nearly 4,000 lithographs he created for the Parisian press have long been appreciated as magic windows on the perils and follies of everyday life and continue to be widely admired. However, it is in his rarer and less famous drawings and watercolors, the private work he made for himself and a very limited audience, that Daumier most clearly emerges as an artist of exceptional genius. Indeed, it was on the strength of his skill as a draughtsman that Baudelaire declared Daumier the equal of Ingres and Delacroix. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, offering the most extensive display of Daumier's drawings since the Paris retrospectives of 1901 and 1934. Featuring about 150 works from twenty of the world's foremost museums and from private collections, it includes casual sketches produced by the artist to vent his restless imagination as well as many of the highly finished watercolors he designed as formal presentations of his art. By combining Daumier's drawings with selected examples of his paintings, prints, and bronzes, this book traces the evolution of the artist's succinct and emphatically expressive style from its roots in the European tradition exemplified by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fragonard to its modern manifestations in the works of Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Beckmann. In the course of his long and productive career Daumier returned again and again to favorite themes, often after considerable lapses of time. Thus the works here are grouped by their subject matter into six sections: studies of individual figures and faces; narrative scenes inspired by history or literature; views of contemporary urban and domestic life; dramatic portrayals of lawyers in court; depictions of street performers; and episodes in the wanderings of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Five essays, in which the exhibition's curators are joined by two other scholars of nineteenth-century art history, investigate particular aspects of Daumier's work as a draughtsman: the character of his fluid, energetic style; the complex iconography and structure of his drawings; the essentially sculptural nature of his art; his effective mastery of pose and gesture; and his personal view of the artist's role in society.

Artist Swoon reflects on Honoré Daumier's _The Third-Class Carriage_ in this episode of The Artist Project.

As in the pastorals of his former master Boucher, Fragonard’s rustic protagonists are envisioned with billowing silk clothing, engaged in amorous pursuits.

In addition to standing among the most prominent craftsmen of their era, Phyfe and Lannuier have become two of the most recognized names in the field of American decorative art scholarship.

"How does a foreigner define America?" Alyce Englund on Charles-Honoré Lannuier's pier table.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 53 include an exquisite pair of 17th-century Chinese birthday gift portraits of an elderly couple, a hidden painting of a Rococo-inspired nude underneath Manet’s 1862 Mademoiselle V. . . . in the Costume of an Espada, and a new identification of the central figure in Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its purpose is to publish original research on works in the Museum’s collection. Articles are contributed by members of the Museum staff and other art historians and specialists.

Although his brief but productive career as a cabinetmaker in New York lasted a mere sixteen years, the French-born maître ébéniste Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819) was a leading figure in the development of a distinctive and highly refined style of furniture in the Late Federal period. A contemporary of the renowned master Duncan Phyfe, Lannuier, like him, made fashionable gilded card tables, marble-topped pier tables, bedsteads, and seating furniture for wealthy clients numbering among the mercantile and social elite of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and Savannah. Honoré, one of ten children, spent his formative years in France. From his much older brother Nicolas, a Parisian cabinetmaker who had attained the rank of master in 1783, he undoubtedly learned the "art and mystery" of cabinetmaking firsthand, honing His skills for a decade before departing for America in 1803. Not long after Honoré heralded his arrival with an advertisement in The New York Evening Post, he established his own workshop and wareroom at 60 Broad Street, and, by 1804, was listed in the New York City Directory. One of his most important commissions, seating furniture for the Common Council Chamber in New York's new City Hall among the most imposing 19th-century public buildings in the United States—would be completed in 1812 and much of it still remains in situ. Lannuier traded on his French background and the cachet that it implied with the handsomely engraved bilingual label that he applied to his finished pieces, which emphasized that he was transmitting directly to America the Greco-Roman revival style popularized in Republican and Early Empire France. This near-obsessive labeling of his work has permitted scholars to appreciate the extent of his considerable legacy of classical style furniture and its impact on the New York cabinetmaking establishment. While his career was cut short by his untimely death, at age 40, when he was at the height of his creative powers, Lannuier's reputation continues to this day. with documented examples of his furniture in the permanent collections of the foremost museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Winterthur Museum, and The White House. This volume, which complements the exhibition "Honoré Lannuier, Parisian Cabinetmaker in Federal New York" held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in spring 1998. represents the most complete study of Lannuier's life and work published to date. In four essays, profusely illustrated in color with overall views and details of Lannuier's finest creations. Ulrich Leben, deputy keeper Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, traces the little that is known of Lannuier's family and his origins in France; Peter M. Kenny, associate curator, American Decorative Arts, and administrator of The American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, explores Lannuier's years spent in New York (1803–19) and examines in depth the subject of connoisseurship with regard to Lannuier's known oeuvre; and Frances F. Bretter, research associate, American Decorative Arts, Department of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discusses Lannuier's relationship to his various illustrious clients, and their pronounced "taste for the French style." In addition, the many fine black-and-white photographs highlight technical aspects of Lannuier's furniture, as well as comparable examples by his contemporaries. The Catalogue section that follows comprises about 125 documented works, arranged chronologically within specific categories, and contains information about materials and provenance, and collection and publication history, for each item. An Appendix provides transcriptions of legal documents, including invoices and Lannuier's marriage contract and will; the last two, in their original form, are on deposit in lower Manhattan. A Selected Bibliography and an Index complete this portrait of a creative and individualistic designer, who, in striving to transmit the "style antique" from France to America, prized novelty and innovation in tandem with craftsmanship of the highest caliber.