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Achille sous sa tente from Histoire ancienne

Creator Honoré Daumier (French, 1808 - 1879)

Date1842

Mediumlithograph on paper

DimensionsOverall (sheet): 37.9 x 25.7 cm (14 15/16 x 10 1/8 in.)

Credit LineGift of R.W. Finlayson, 1969, Donated by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, 1988

Category

Prints

Object numberL69.65

ProvenanceThe Histoire ancienne series was Daumier’s way of weighing in and commenting on the battle between classicism and romanticism in the arts in France at the time. Daumier, and Le Charivari as a team, criticized the Salon jury’s bias towards mythological subject matter and the École des Beaux-Arts’ values and training system. Daumier was tired of seeing countless artists producing images of false antiquity and created a series of works that mocked the heroes of Ancient Greece. His subjects are classical but they are placed in absurd situations and debased through their physical appearance. Achilles, the great warrior in Greek mythology, is downgraded to an ordinary person who has a body that is rather skeletal. In Daumier’s lithograph, Achilles seems disinterested and carries a pose that is hardly heroic. Daumier’s print is meant to look like an ancient relief sculpture; he employed grey tones (rather than the black ones he usually utilized) to achieve this effect. The caption sarcastically notes that Charles Texier (1802-1871), an historian and archaeologist, discovered this stone in the ruins of the Faubourg Monmartre area – a location not known for archaeological excavations. Moreover, to lampoon Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), an artist who made his legacy as a neoclassical painter, the inscription says that Ingres thought the relief sculpture to be an original work by Phidias – a Greek artist living in the 5th century BC. Daumier’s Histoire ancienne series along with the articles related to the images in Le Charivari were very successful.

LocationNot currently on display

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