“Daumier’s particular genius is evident in the stunning and disciplined clarity of his images […] The artist never became mired in detail or narratives that required explanation, but instead concentrated on defining character through incisive description. Thus, true identities are revealed”
Painted in his quintessential palette of inky blacks and blues and with astute observational skill, Le banc des avocats is a wonderful example of the most celebrated theme of Honoré Daumier’s œuvre - expressive images of French nobility, politicians, magistrates, lawyers and other bureaucrats. Considered among the best social satire drawings of the 19th century, these pictures offered pointed critiques of contemporary society and captured the flavour of modern life during the Second Empire.
The present scene depicts the lawyers of the Palais de Justice in Paris, whose proceedings and posturing theatrics fascinated Daumier throughout his career. The French courts were a familiar environment for the artist from his childhood, when his father had turned to the courts to settle financial disputes, to his first job as a bailiff’s assistant. By 1831 his family lived across from the Palais de Justice, where the artist undoubtedly bore close witness to the parade of judges, lawyers and their myriad clients who frequented its halls. Indeed, such was the artist’s intimate knowledge of the legal profession that, during his retrospective exhibition in 1878, one of advocates of the court, Léon Gambetta, commented that he recognised some of his colleagues in these drawings. Daumier's friend and fellow artist Geoffroy-Dechaume assured the judge that those depicted represented a composite or character types rather than specific individuals: "[Daumier] knows lawyers, and above all the lawyer, better than they know themselves. Whence the resemblance that so surprises you" (quoted in Daumier (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1999-2000, p. 271).
Le banc des avocats was part of the personal collection of Henry Moore but has since been restituted to the heirs of Anna Caspari, to whom the work originally belonged. Hailing from an esteemed Jewish family in the Munich art trade, Anna Caspari directed Galerie Caspari throughout the 1930s despite the worsening economic situation and repression by the Nazi regime. As part of the Galerie Caspari collection, the work was transferred to the Dresner Bank as loan collateral in 1933. The Caspari family never received the work back, nor any of the proceeds of the subsequent sale by the bank and by 1940 the work had entered into the London art trade.
This ownership history of Le banc des avocats was unknown to Moore who had long admired Daumier as an artist, and chose to display the present work in the intimate setting of his sitting room (fig.1 & 2). For Moore, Daumier’s draughtsmanship was exceptional in its ability to distill a sculptural quality into his painting. In an interview in 1962 Henry Moore said of Daumier:
“Daumier is another who could draw in a three-dimensional way and had no difficulty in transferring his concepts into sculpture”.
The formal idiom of the present work certainly captures that quintessential play of shadow and mass that defines Moore’s own three-dimensional forms. Here, the faces of the judges, dramatically lit from the left are cast as physiognomic volumes with theatrical shadow adding structure to their sunken cheeks and furrowed brows. In this expressive palette of light and dark, with details drawn out in fine and confident brushwork, Daumier captures both the various physical forms of these judicial figures as well as each individual’s temperament as they contend with the most fundamental questions of innocence and guilt.