1851
ink
From the collection of National Gallery of Art
Alliance des Bonapartistes et des Capucins is a 1851 ink by Honoré Daumier, a Impressionism work, held at National Gallery of Art.
Two men hug in a Paris print shop. One wears a fancy coat. The other looks ragged. Their faces stay blank. Daumier used this blank face trick to mock politics. He drew fat men and thin men as symbols, not people. The joke lands harder when you know he risked jail for such prints. It’s all in ink on stone—no brush, no canvas. Look up lithography to see how this trick works.
Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870.
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