Influenza Epidemic of 1858

Honoré-Victorien Daumier
26 February 1808, Marseille – 11 February 1879, Valmondois, France

Honoré Daumier is France’s greatest caricaturist and political and social satirist.
During his career, he produced around 5,000 lithographs, 300 paintings, 800 drawings, 1,000 woodcuts, and 50 sculptures.

♦ Omnibus During an Influenza Epidemic (1858) ♦

♦ Diagnosis:
Main symptoms: Irritating cough in young and old, runny nose, shivering.
Associated symptoms: Crowded location, fatigue, headache, warm clothing.
Clinical diagnosis: Influenza (flu), epidemic.

♦ Definition: influenza
Epidemic disease, which sometimes becomes pandemic, characterized by inflammation of the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract, accompanied by purulent mucus, fever, muscle pain, and exhaustion.
The cause is the influenza virus, which appears in constantly changing variants.

♦ Discussion
Influenza has many complications, the most common of which is pneumonia.
Pleurisy, middle ear infection (otitis), and neuritis can also occur.
The disease usually breaks out during the winter months, particularly in January and February, and is highly contagious. Influenza affects all ages.
The currently available vaccines against the influenza virus prevent the development of clinically recognizable disease in a low percentage of vaccinated individuals. The protection is specific to each type of influenza virus and is therefore short-lived.

Although he was born in Marseille, Daumier spent most of his life in Paris. He grew up in a poor family and in 1822 took his first drawing lessons with the renowned artist and archaeologist Alexander Lenoir.
In his free time, Honoré Daumier sketched at the Académie Quisse and in the Louvre.
His financial situation forced him to take on various jobs.
At just 14 years old, he began experimenting with lithographs and tried to work for newspapers.
His keen observational skills formed the basis for around 5,000 satirical prints on political and social themes. His career took off in 1830 when an uprising led to the abdication of the repressive Bourbon King Charles X, and the more liberal monarchy under Louis-Philippe of the House of Orléans replaced him.

His caricatures appeared in the weekly magazine La Caricature, founded by Charles Philipon.
Daumier was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for two lithographs, one of which depicted King Louis-Philippe as Rabelais’ gluttonous giant Gargantua.
A positive outcome of this unpleasant incident was that he instantly became famous. His case is one of the most well-known examples in history of an artist persecuted by the state.
In 1835, the government passed a law that so heavily restricted political caricatures that Daumier was forced to give up his political satire.
His publisher, Charles Philipon, was even compelled to discontinue La Caricature.
However, Daumier had already anticipated such events in 1832 when he founded the newspaper Le Charivari, which allowed him to create satirical social portraits of bourgeois society in Paris. In the last years of his life, Daumier was practically blind, but he was saved from poverty by Corot, a French painter who gave the blind and impoverished Daumier a small house.

Source: Jan Dequeker

♦ Honoré Daumier
During his life, Daumier was primarily known as a political and social satirist.
After his death, the aesthetic quality of his paintings and sculptures also began to be recognized. Daumier started his career as a graphic artist after training in lithography.

In 1832, he was imprisoned for six months for lèse-majesté due to a monarchy-critical satire depicting Louis-Philippe of France as Gargantua. From the late 1840s onwards, he increasingly used watercolor and oil paints instead of lithographs.
Daumier was admired by Camille Corot (who saved him from poverty when he became blind), Eugène Delacroix, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, and many 20th-century expressionists.

One of Daumier’s works, Christ and His Apostles, hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Daumier’s caricatures of lawyers and judges remain very popular among legal professionals and decorate many law offices. More than 7,500 of Daumier’s works are preserved at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Jan Dequeker
The Artist and the Doctor Photoos
wikimedia.org

omnibus influenza
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