Honoré Daumier (1808 – 1879) stands with his prolifi c body of work characterized by a way of describing reality that is at once detached and empathetic, alongside Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet as one of the fathers of Realism – the cultural movement that emerged out of positivism in France around 1840.

Daumier was also a great popularizer of ideas, a journalist who used images rather than words, a newspaper cartoonist who, like those of today, reacted to current events – current events that seem, strangely, not so very different from those of our own times. The exhibition presents about 180 or so of the artist’s engravings and drawings, including sculptures, grouped thematically with a particular focus on the development of a society avid for entertainment and its casualties, the development of the press, the world of art and artists and the birth of the European nations, not forgetting the famous series of lawyers and justice.