Honoré DAUMIER
The Lawyer
Medium Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in black chalk
Dimension 17.1 x 13.1 cm (6³/₄ x 5¹/₈ inches)
The first owner of the present sheet was the French writer and art critic Roger Marx (1859-1913), one of the earliest collectors of Daumier’s drawings. As his son, the art historian Claude Roger-Marx, later recalled of his father’s collection of drawings by Daumier: ‘From my early childhood, I have lived in daily intimacy with Daumier’s exciting world. At a time when he was still considered only a “humourist”, my father was able to acquire two cardboard boxes of drawings and sketches that had miraculously escaped destruction. These first thoughts, like the painted studies, were so disregarded at the time that it is said that almost all of them were thrown away by his widow in the trash. Between Daumier and myself all distances were removed. I tried to forget everything that others had written about him in order to find myself free of all topicality, served by an inexhaustible imagination, an extraordinary visual memory, one to one with his ardour, his sadness too…’
Following his death in December 1913, Roger Marx’s collection was dispersed in five auctions held the following year. The present sheet was included in one of these sales, in May 1914, when it was acquired by the collector and pioneering Islamic art dealer Dikran G. Kelekian (1868-1951). Of Armenian descent, Kelekian had established his successful business in antiquities in Constantinople in 1892, and later opened galleries in Cairo, Paris, New York and London. Sometime in the 1910s Kelekian began collecting works by modern French artists, especially of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist schools, and by 1920 had amassed an impressive collection that included works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard.
Medium: Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in black chalk
Signature: Inscribed H Daumier / Hier(?) biseau anglais - / [?] on the verso.
Dimension: 17.1 x 13.1 cm (6³/₄ x 5¹/₈ inches)
Provenance: Roger Marx, Paris
His posthumous sale, Paris, Galerie Manzi, Joyant, 11-12 May 1914, lot 119 (L’Avocat. En robe, tête découverte, il pérore dans le feu de la plaidoirie. Fond blanc, noir gris et bleu. Dessin rehaussé. Haut., 16 cent.; larg., 12 cent.)
Dikran Garabed Kelekian, Paris and New York
Private collection, New York
Anonymous sale, New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 13 May 1953, lot 16
Fine Arts Associates, New York
Private collection, America, in 1967
Grace Borgenicht, New York
Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 28 March 2012, lot 225
Gérard Lhéritier (Aristophil), Nice.
Literature: Erich Klossowski, Honoré Daumier, Munich, 1923, p.102, no.177Q; K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, Vol.II, London, 1967, p.209, no.630, illustrated pl.237.
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