Mr. Frank Weitenkampf, the curator of the Lenox Library print department, shows nineteen portfolios which hold about seven hundred lithographs by Honoré Daumier. This collection is a bequest of the late Mr. Lawrence, and we doubt if the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris surpasses it; that is, in the number of detached examples. There the works of the great artist are imbedded in the various publications for which he laboured so many years--such at _La Caricature, Les Beaux Arts, L'Artiste, Les Modes Parisiennes, La Gazette Musicale, Le Boulevard,_ and _Masques et Visages_. The Lawrence lithographs are representatives, though not complete; the catalogue compiled by Loys Delteil comprises 3,958 plates; the paintings and drawings are also numerous. But an admirable idea of Daumier's versatile genius may be gleaned at the Lenox Library, as all the celebrated series are there: Paris Bohemians, the Blue Stockings, the Railways, La Caricature, Croquis d'Expressions, Emotions Parisiennes, Actualités, Les Baigneurs, Pastorales, Moeurs Conjugales, the Don Quixote plates, Silhouettes, Souvenirs d'Artistes, Types Parisiens, the Advocates and Judges, and a goodly number of the miscellanies. Altogether an adequate exhibition.
Honoré Daumier, who died February 11, 1879, was almost the last of the giants of 1830, though he outlived many of them. Not affiliated with the Barbizon group--though he was a romantic in his hatred of the bourgeois--several of these painters were intimate friends; indeed, Corot was his benefactor, making him a present of a cottage at Valmondois (Seine-et-Oise), where the illustrator died. He was blind and lonely at the end. Corot died 1875; Daubigny, his companion, 1878; Millet, 1875, and Rousseau, with whom he corresponded, died 1867. In 1879 Flaubert still lived, working heroically upon that monument of human inanity, Bouvard et Pécuchet; Maupassant, his disciple, had just published a volume of verse; Manet was regarded as a dangerous charlatan, Monet looked on as a madman; while poor Cézanne was only a bad joke. The indurated critical judgment of the academic forces pronounced Bonnat a greater portraitist than Velasquez, and Gérôme and his mock antiques and mock orientalism far superior to Fromentin and Chasseriau. It was a glorious epoch for mediocrity. And Daumier, in whom there was something of Michael Angelo and Courbet, was admired only as a clever caricaturist, the significance of his paintings escaping all except a few. Corot knew, Daubigny knew, as earlier Delacroix knew; and Balzac had said: "There is something of the Michael Angelo in this man!"