it; wouldn’t take it as a gift,” said the dealer.  “I like the other better.  Besides, I never sell any but expensive pictures,” and he went away satisfied that a man who sold so cheaply was not much of an artist.  This anecdote, which we heard second hand from Daubigny, may be a fable, yet it never failed to send Daubigny into fits of laughter.  It may be surmised that, despite his herculean labours, extending over more than half a century, Daumier never knew how to make or save money.

He was born at Marseilles in 1808.  His father was a third-rate poet who, suspecting his own gift, doubted the talent of his son, though this talent was both precocious and prodigious.  The usual thing happened.  Daumier would stick at nothing but his drawing; the attempt to force him into law studies only made him hate the law and lawyers and that hatred he never ceased to vent in his caricatures.  He knocked about until he learned in 1829 the technics of lithography; then he soon became self-supporting.  His progress was rapid.  He illustrated for the Boulevard journals; he caricatured Louis Philippe and was sent to jail, Sainte-Pelagie, for six months.  Many years afterward he attacked with a like ferocity Napoleon III.

Look at his frontispiece—­rather an advertisement—­of Victor Hugo’s Les Chatiments.  It is as sinister, as malign as a Rops.  The big book, title displayed, crushes to earth a vulture which is a travesty of the Napoleonic beak.  Daumier was a power in Paris.  Albert Wolff, the critic of Figaro, tells how he earned five francs each time he provided a text for a caricature by Daumier, and Philipon, who founded several journals, actually claimed a share in Daumier’s success because he wrote some of the silly dialogues to his plates.

Daumier was the artistic progenitor of the Caran d’Aches, the Forains—­who was it that called Forain “Degas en caricature"?—­Willettes, and Toulouse-de-Lautrecs.  He was a political pamphleteer, a scourger of public scamps, and a pictorial muck-raker of genius.  His mockery of the classic in art was later paralleled by Offenbach in La Belle Helene.  But there were other sides to his genius.  Tiring of the hurly-burly of journalism, he retired in 1860 to devote himself to painting.

His style has been pronounced akin to that of Eugene Carriere; his sense of values on a par with Goya’s and Rembrandt’s (that Shop Window of his in the Durand-Ruel collection is truly Rembrandtesque).  This feeling for values was so remarkable that it enabled him to produce an impression with three or four tones.  The colours he preferred were grays, browns, and he manipulated his blacks like a master.  Mauclair does not hesitate to put Daumier among the great painters of the past century on the score of his small canvases.  “They contain all his gifts of bitter and profound observation, all the mastery of his drawings, to which they add the attractions of rich and intense colour,” declares Mauclair.