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Slide  Summer Sketch  Daumier

While Daumier satirised the more or less harmless affectations of the bourgeois & the new rich he also showed, with a sympathetic humor, their genuine emotions. You have it here in this Croquis D'éte, Summer Sketch of June 1858. A parisian couple is being renewed by a day in the country. Whatever ridiculous unbeauty exists in the man is transcended by the sense of pleasure & affectionate communication between him and his wife. He is toothless, but a boy again. The wife reflects his pleasure.

Daumier appreciated the middle class virtures & he embodied them in his own life to a large extent, but he did not recreate them with the sympathetic dignity of Chardin. For one thing Daumier was too aggressively the social reformer. Too, by his time the bourgeois had increased greatly in numbers & wealth. They had become the dominant class but as they grew in power they developed more & more conventions & became more materialistic in their ambitions. The virtues became less philosophical & more substantial! As the outward security became greater the inner security was less. For example in the cultures, art, muisc & literature, the reactions were based less on native intelligence than they were on what convention accepted.

On the political side this materialistic aggression brought into the popular governments the corruption that had always been the curse of the monarchies.

France writhed again; threw off Napoleon III & emerged as the Third Republic.