Caricature

Peter Quennell

A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th-Century Paris Judith Wechsler (Thames and Hudson £18.50) 'The cross, clever French', as their keen admirer Nancy Mitford once ap- Preciatively called them, though they often

speak ill of other races, reserve for their own countrymen both their sternest criticisms and their most venomous abuse.

Perhaps it is their long revolutionary tradi- tion that has encouraged the habit of in- ternecine feuding; so that today, in France, even a literary or artistic dispute soon becomes a pitched battle, carried on with a sustained ferocity that sometimes astonishes their easier-going neighbours.

Naturally, caricature has always flourish- ed in Paris; Judith Wechsler chronicles the Period of French life, between 1830 and

1.870, during which the caricaturist's opera- tions were particularly effective. Honore

Daumier is her chief hero. Born in 1808, the son of an impoverished but ambitious ar- tisan, having been apprenticed first to a lithographer, then to an enlightened Publisher, he began drawing in the late 1820s and, in 1830, the year of the July Revolution, executed his earliest political caricatures. When he gave up work in 1872, he had produced almost four thousand lithographs and a thousand wood- engravings.

Daumier had a many-sided genius. A Splendid draughtsman, he was also a pas- sionate observer of contemporary social life — 'one must be of one's time,' he said; and his targets ranged from the thriving, self- complacent middle class, the 'Good bourgeois', whom he mercilessly, yet here and there half-affectionately ridiculed, to the law-courts, the realms of High Finance and the seat of royal government.

King Louis-Philippe, a caricaturist's delight, nicknamed la Poire owing to the

Peculiar shape of his head and the swollen outline of his stomach, Daumier showed light-heartedly blowing bubbles, each bub-

ble being a promise he had made before he occupied the throne. The pretended democrat, `le roi des barricades' — was he not the son of the regicide Philippe Egalite? had at length become a tyrant; or so his Socialist opponents claimed; and in 1834 baumier issued a terrible plate he called 'Rue Transnonain' that depicted the Murderous effects of conservative repres- sion.

Like his fellow-draughtsmen, besides satirising the existence of innumerable or- dinary Parisians as they went about their daily business, Daumier had a favourite type whom he exalted to the status of Mythical monstrosity. From his friend

Henry Monnier, an actor, author and caricaturist combined, he borrowed that memorable personage Joseph Prudhomme, the epitome of pompous middle-class hum- bug, and portrayed him, with unflagging gusto, in more than sixty different situa- tions. Now Prudhomme at the seaside in- scribes his signature upon a cliff, remarking meanwhile to his stout, devoted wife: 'I shall append your name, too, Adelaide; the respect that I profess for the fair sex obliges me'. Now he confronts a bust of himself at an exhibition, declaring: 'It is certainly my profile; but I shall always regret that the ar- tist had the obstinacy to omit my spec- tacles!'

Daumier, 'his strategy and style', oc- cupies a large section of Judith Wechsler's monograph. But among the other artists she introduces and appraises are Gavarni, Grandville and the wondrous mime Deburau. Of these Gavarni was the most versatile. Not only did he produce over twice as many lithographs as Daumier dur- ing a professional career that lasted four decades; he was also deeply interested in contemporary fashion and, for Girardin's magazine La Mode, dashed off enchanting illustrations — probably the loveliest fashion-plates ever published — of the elegant dresses he had himself designed. That was in Romantic 1830s; but latterly he tired of art, and developed into the philosopher, mathematician and lonely sage whom Edmond and Jules de Goncourt adopted as their guide and oracle.

Grandville, too, was a remarkably ver- satile spirit; but towards the end of his life, abandoning straightforward social satire, he entered a fantastic universe in which he felt much more at home, where flowers walk and talk, insects conduct oratorios, animals take on human guises and fishes play the part of anglers. Judith Wechsler acknowledges his imaginative gifts — she has a catholic appreciation of her subject; but I am sorry that she should have paid so little attention to the brilliant sculptor Jean- Pierre Edouard Dantan, whose fascinating statuettes of Hugo, Balzac, Paganini, Liszt, modelled just befOre Daumier started work, must evidently have inspired him.

Their affection for the stage and vision of life as a panoramic spectacle distinguished all the artists mentioned in this book. But Deburau stands alone, the offspring of a troupe of acrobats, who, from 1819 to 1846, continued day after day to hold his audience spellbound at the small and squalid Theatre des Funambules on the Boulevard du Temple. Deburau was a tragic white-faced clown, the ill-treated pierrot of the traditional Commedia dell'arte. Until 1830 he and his cast were forbidden to employ dialogue; but Deburau's intensely expressive face and poignantly revealing gestures — he looked 'as mysterious as silence', Baudelaire wrote, 'as flexible as the serpent activated by strange springs' — enabled him to present a series of wordless satirical pantomimes that reflected a hundred contrasted aspects of the changing urban scene. 'With his melan-

choly long features and his calm un- preparedness amid the horse-play of others', he must surely have resembled that great American comedian Buster Keaton. His misadventures had somehow an acute symbolic pathos. Deburau's Pierrot 'is the people', Jules Janin considered, 'in turn happy, sad, sick, well, beating, being beaten, musician, poet, simpleton, always poor...'

Judith Wechsler attributes her characters' achievements partly to the social conditions under which they worked, but, at the same time, to the influence of the 18th-century Johan Caspar Lavater, who had sought to classify the types of the human face, and whose system Balzac had himself accepted: 'In 19th century Paris, in a context of ur- ban pressure, dislocation and mass com- munication, this visual lore of physiognomy, bearing and gesture, gained currency, immediacy and artistic power.'

Caricature, she adds, is the expression of an age before the artist had relinquished his 'human role of helping his public to make sense of its surroundings', and social obser- vation had taken the 'complementary path of professionalisation, subdivision and quantification'. Here and elsewhere, her approach to her theme is perhaps a bit ponderous: what the average modern caricaturist lacks is not so much a sense of public duty as more accomplished draughtsmanship and a personal sense of style. Otherwise, such solemnities apart, this is an extremely interesting and useful volume.