Peachy the Magazine August September 2014 | Page 99

ART + ARCHITECTURE

unprecedented unrest and upheaval.
France spiraled through five governments after the French Revolution of
1789, just as industrialization was gaining traction and creating a new underclass of impoverished urban workers
who had no representation politically.
This milieu provided endless fodder
for Daumier’s caustic social commentary. As a caricature artist Daumier laid
bare the cruelty, pretension and folly of
nineteenth century French society in the
form of physical absurdity, and Walker
is certainly working the same trope
with her sculptural caricature. 
However, while Walker would expect
art to be leveraged as a tool of social
activism, this was the exception not
the rule in Daumier’s day. The commissioned nature of art in his time forced
artists to flatter rather than disparage.
It was Daumier’s facility with lithography and his subsequent role as a lampooning caricaturist at La Caricature
and Le Charivari that provided him
with a platform to begin critiquing
contemporary Parisian culture. He was
imprisoned for six months for the publication of Gargantua, a biting portrayal
of Emperor Louis-Philippe, replete with
humorous scatological imagery.
After his release from prison, Daumier
began to focus on painting, which had

always been his medium of choice but
not one that could afford him livelihood. His paintings have been compared to the “black paintings” of Goya
and to the straightforward realism of
Courbet. His loose brush stroke and
use of light have led many scholars to
believe that he helped pave the way
for Impressionism, and the subjective
nature of his work is said to have
influenced the Expressionists. 
The Third Class Carriage, although
unfinished, is Daumier’s most
renowned painting, and depicts a
working class family traveling by train.
It is no surprise that Daumier chose the
locomotive as the method of transportation in the painting, for the train was a
symbol of modernity and represented
the profound societal shifts caused
by industrialization. The painting is a
study in the plight of the working class,
and the drab palette emphasizes their
dire circumstance. We see a mother
nursing her baby, a weary grandmother
with sunken eyes and a boy fast asleep,
and we query where the father might
be. As Daumier surely intended, the
painting elicits compassion. The structure of the work underscores t