SYMMONS, SARAH - Daumier

London, Chaucer Press, 2004. Hardcover. ISBN: 1904449239. Reprint of an earlier edition, Tall quarto, illustrated with black & white and some colour plates. Fine cloth hard back with a fine dust jacket. No inscriptions or marks, an excellent copy. Sarah Symmons both examines DaumierAEs role as a professional newspaper artist and explores his more personal body of work, which remained largely unknown during his lifetime. Investigating his series of watercolours and oils of the ordinary citizens of Paris, of the railway travellers, mounte-banks and washerwomen who also people his caricatures, she finds a tragic monumentality far removed from the journalistic cynicism of much of his newspaper work. This quality they share with his more ambitious studies of the dispossessed, of fugitives and emigrants, and of the heroically absurd wanderings of Don Quixote.. Fine .