Pages of History: Daumier’s Political Eye

Lithography, the art of printing from stone, was developed from the innovative work of Aloys Senefelder during the final years of the eighteenth century, and offered artists a low-cost reproduction process capable of producing multiple copies of an original drawing. Importantly, lithographs enabled relatively immediate responses to events. As such, Senefelder’s invention opened up new audiences and sources of income for artists. In France, lithographs dealing with political and other topics were published in illustrated newspapers such as La Silhouette, La Caricature and Le Charivari, or sold over the counter in the growing number of lithograph shops, where they were frequently displayed for sale in shop windows. In this way, though beyond the means of most, lithographs provided a means of communicating ideas to the man or woman in the street, as well as to more traditional audiences. In spite of the tradition for caricature pioneered by Gillray, Hogarth and others in Georgian Britain, Thackeray opined that the lower classes in France displayed a much greater responsiveness to art in the mid-nineteenth century than did their English counterparts.