Police Brutality in Rue Transnonain, a Painting by Honore Daumier
Honoré Daumier is a press caricaturist in 19 century France and one of the most renowned printmakers ever to work on lithographs. He was born in Marseille, France on February 20, 1808 and known for creating over 4,000 lithographs and 1,000 wood engravings (annexgalleries.com). Daumier's Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834 is a painting with a size of 28.6 X 44 cm. and was completed in 1834 (Frank 113). The painting depicts the police brutality where the militia assumed the suspect to be in one of the working-class buildings, killing innocent occupants in an apartment on the Transnonain Street during 1834 in Paris (Frank 113- 114). It is a representational art of a person's portrait.
Straightaway the viewer notices the painting of a man wearing a nightshirt and a cap, but with closer inspection he is actually tangled up with the bed sheet. However, it is not immediately apparent that the dead man is lying on top of a dead baby with blood on the floor. Observing the entire picture, two dead bodies are to be noticed on each side while the bed fills up the background. The primary colors used are black and white with some hints of gray.
Daumier's work is a product of lithography, a printmaking process, which he uses a greasy, oil-based crayon drawn directly on a stone. The technique used were different styles of hatching that emphasizes the figures in the picture. The primarily used colors were black and white with hints of gray; furthermore, variety of lines and shading were applied in several ways which gave a sense of visual texture, space, mass and shapes of the dead man crushing the dead baby with blood smudges on the floor in the darkness of the shaded areas of the room. The artist's portrayal of the motionless man atop of the bleeding baby and lack of time clarifies death. A variety of elements are seen throughout the picture with an asymmetrical balance because either side is not the same.
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The picture's format was depicted by a dramatically altered human proportion of the dead man lying against the bed. He was drawn on the same level of the other dead bodies, and the enlarged bed as the background gave the impression of the bodies was lying on the floor. The other dead bodies and dark areas serve as the subordination in the picture that clearly gave emphasis on the man dangled with the bed sheet engulfed in a lighter shade. The combination of the light and dark shading and different depths of the figures provided contrast which gave the audience the visual effect of being in the room with the victims. However, there were no directional forces, repetition nor rhythm observed in the portrait.
The overall feeling of Daumier's work was hate for the perpetrators and sympathy for the victims. The portrait was illustrated with a bed that symbolizes rest and tranquility and diminished with the portrayal of the massacred bodies; but it was not drawn during the execution of the slaughter. Daumier's lithograph was in black and white which made the picture refined, yet heightened the sense of the barbarity over clearly innocent victims. He captured the moment of the horrific and the quiet aftermath of the massacre; it ignited the viewers' rage of injustice which occurred in a definite picture of a trespass. The dead man lying atop of a baby in a pool of blood on the floor gave the feeling of sympathy for innocent people losing their lives because of poor judgment of the government at that time. The darker shadings of the picture depicted the shadows in the room, thus giving the sense of curiosity for the viewers.
Daumier's art was highly successful and neatly done in his chosen medium. The intentions behind the work have all formalist, contextual and expressive theories. Later lithography works such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Jane Avril had spatter techniques, large format, and vivid colors were used on poster advertising (Frank 114); his work is a creation of realism that focuses on the present time period which exposes people and events as they were. In fact, Daumier's works are identical to modern-day journalism-capturing facts with no distortion of reality.
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Police Brutality in Rue Transnonain, a Painting by Honore Daumier. (2023, May 29). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/police-brutality-in-rue-transnonain-a-painting-by-honore-daumier/
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