From head-on studies to views from behind, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) captured horses walking, trotting or in full gallop, stately stallions and limping ponies alike, with riders seated or thrown. The French painter, sculptor and caricaturist produced dozens of such works throughout his career. Among them is the drawing Man on Horseback, once part of Theo and Vincent van Gogh’s personal collection. Sketched in three-quarter view, the rider’s face remains a mere suggestion, while the horse is full of life, with its eyes, muzzle and pricked ears clearly defined. Leaning back slightly with reins in hand and a thumb hooked on his hip, the rider presses his leg firmly against the animal’s flank, as if urging it into a swifter pace.
Daumier as a draughtsman
Between 1832 and 1875, Daumier worked as a caricaturist for the magazine Le Charivari, producing nearly 4,000 socially and politically charged satirical prints. Despite having to navigate strict censorship laws, Le Charivari maintained a fierce anti-monarchist and republican stance, with many of Daumier’s works offering biting critiques of the French government. The sheer pressure of this workload left him with little time for other artistic pursuits, although he had long dreamed of becoming an independent artist. Following the 1848 revolution, the magazine faced a period of financial instability. With fewer commissions coming in, Daumier finally found the time to focus on his own drawing and painting.
During this period of greater creative freedom, he moved away from social and political commentary. His interests shifted towards new themes, which he often explored in series. From 1860 onwards, Daumier’s work exhibited increasing thematic and stylistic liberty, and his output of satirical prints began to wane.
Drawing was more than a skill for Daumier; it was a vital outlet for his insatiable imagination. The critic Charles Baudelaire famously dubbed this talent an ‘unavoidable vocation’, ranking Daumier alongside Delacroix and Ingres as one of the pre-eminent draughtsmen of the age. Between 1830 and 1850, when his demanding role at Le Charivari left him little time for independent artistic projects, Daumier worked primarily as a caricaturist, producing drawings both directly on the lithographic stone and on specially prepared paper for transfer lithographs. For these reasons, independent drawings and preparatory studies from these early decades are exceptionally rare.
After 1848, when he found more time for himself, Daumier frequently produced drawings related to his paintings – sometimes as direct studies, but often created after he had already begun the subject on canvas. He approached painting systematically, returning to the same themes time and again, and the numerous related drawings of recurring subjects offer a window into his creative process, showing how he would vary or simplify a particular scene. Occasionally he produced elaborate compositional drawings; at other times, he sketched only a single figure or group from a broader scene, demonstrating an obsessive creative drive. He also possessed a photographic memory and worked purely from his own imagination, allowing him to endlessly vary a single idea. Baudelaire characterised his memory as ‘marvellous and quasi-divine’. The result was a vast graphic oeuvre: while over 1,000 drawings are known today, there were likely many more. In 1883, the French writer Théodore de Banville described a visit to Daumier’s studio, which was filled with ‘bulging portfolios, overflowing with drawings, that could no longer be closed’.
The monogram ‘h.D.’ in the lower-left corner of the Van Gogh Museum’s Man on Horseback is written in a darker ink, suggesting that Daumier signed this work together with a number of others. This was a common habit: he would monogram large batches of study sheets and loose sketches from his studio at one sitting to prepare them for sale. In his final years, Daumier lived in dire poverty, and although such sketches fetched little, they provided a much-needed source of income.
Honoré Daumier, Bank of the Seine, c. 1855–60, oil on panel, 44.7 × 55.7 cm, Museum Wales, Cardiff. Photo: By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru — Museum Wales
Horse drawings, horse paintings and comparisons
Because of Daumier’s obsessive interest in a narrow, yet eclectic range of subjects, clear thematic threads can be traced throughout his independent work. He frequently drew saltimbanques (the street performers he encountered in his home city of Paris), members of the legal profession, and a significant number of horses. Many of these equestrian works bear a striking resemblance to Man on Horseback, whether in their stylistic execution or their overall composition.
In some drawings, as with Man on Horseback, Daumier depicted a horse and rider without placing them in a broader context or scene. In a drawing dated to around 1865, for example, he sketched a horse from the side with a rider who – unlike the figure leaning comfortably back in the Van Gogh Museum’s work – is hunched forward as if riding into a headwind. Another drawing () shows the horse in almost exactly the same posture as Man on Horseback, although here Daumier used broad strokes of chalk to suggest a dark sky and ground. The background is similarly sparsely developed in The Emigrants, a drawing depicting emigrants or refugees, a theme Daumier explored in several drawings and paintings around 1850. Horsemen at a River (c. 1850–70) in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen also features a horse and rider in profile, with a figure leaning slightly back, much like in Man on Horseback. They stand at the river’s edge while another rider and his horse have already entered the water.
The subject of riders by a river also recurs in several paintings bearing a resemblance to Man on Horseback. Bank of the Seine (), for example, includes a rider on a white horse – probably a stable hand watering his mount in the river. A Man on a White Horse (originally titled L’Abreuvoir, or ‘The Watering Place’) depicts the same subject (). Daumier likely developed an interest in this theme while living on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris between 1846 and 1863; the Pont Marie, which connected the island to the rest of the city, was a popular resting spot for working horses. In their physique, these muscular horses and their riders exhibit the closest similarity to the drawing in the Van Gogh Museum.
With subtle adjustments to the posture of his horses and riders, Daumier was able to reinvent these equestrian scenes time and again. This inquisitive, experimental approach is a hallmark of his oeuvre. As a caricaturist, he possessed a keen eye for body language, understanding how a slight forward slouch or a nonchalant lean could transform a figure’s appearance. Writing on this talent in 1878, the critic Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) noted: ‘He was, above all, a profound captor of movement, gesture and physiognomy.’ This is equally evident in his independent work. In Man on Horseback, Daumier convincingly captures a confident air, showing the rider leaning back with one hand on his hip.
Style
Daumier’s compulsion to draw is evident not only in his choice of recurring subjects but also in his very technique. Man on Horseback is a rapidly executed sketch, characterised by a scratchy, swirling and remarkably loose use of line. Through a multitude of fluid, fine strokes in black ink, Daumier seems almost to feel his way around the subject, allowing the form to emerge as he works. While certain passages such as the horse’s head are more highly developed, others are merely suggested with a few swift flicks of the pen. The horse’s right hind leg is rendered in this minimal fashion, as is the ground, indicated by just a few hasty scratches. Despite its economy, the sketch possesses a tangible sense of depth, achieved through varied line thicknesses and the rhythmic repetition of strokes in areas like the head and the rider’s leg. The aesthetic is fundamentally different from the sharp, contour-based style of his caricatures. Here, the approach is not at all defined by outlines. Although built entirely of lines, the overall effect remains remarkably painterly.
A vast array of techniques can be found among the more than one thousand drawings by Daumier known today. The sketchy, nervous delineation in the Van Gogh Museum drawing is characteristic of his later work, produced after his workload at Le Charivari had finally begun to ease. His health declined rapidly from 1865 and his eyesight began to fail, yet he continued to work until at least the early 1870s. The swirling style seen in Man on Horseback appears most frequently in drawings from the 1860s and 1870s (), where the looseness of the lines suggests a sense of dynamism and movement. Man on Horseback is dated between 1850 and 1870 – the period in which Daumier was most prolific in his depictions of horses, and when this particular drawing style reached its peak.
One equestrian theme stands out within Daumier’s oeuvre: the story of the knight Don Quixote from Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel. Released in a new French translation in 1836–38, the book was incredibly popular among Parisians, but Daumier in particular became obsessed with the subject, producing a vast number of drawings. Again, these were often executed in a rapid style, though here horse and rider – in contrast to Man on Horseback – were frequently depicted as emaciated and rendered with a particularly nervous energy ().
It is quite possible that Daumier saw something of himself in Don Quixote: a misunderstood figure who did not quite fit into his own time. For most of his career, he held higher artistic aspirations than the work he produced for Le Charivari, yet as his contributions to the magazine dwindled, he fell into serious financial hardship. It was not until 1878, a year before his death, that a solo exhibition of his work was finally organised by his friend, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. By then, Daumier was retired and almost entirely blind. The exhibition committee included influential figures such as the writer Victor Hugo (1802–1885), the critic Philippe Burty (1830–1890), and the painter Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878), who looked upon their friend’s poverty with sorrow and hoped to offer him support. Commercially, however, the exhibition was a fiasco; Daumier sold almost nothing, and the gallery suffered a loss of nearly 10,000 francs. Despite this, Daumier’s desire to be recognised as more than just a caricaturist remained. He was determined to be known as a fully-fledged artist in his own right.
Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote, pen and brown ink on paper, 31.1 × 24.4 cm. The Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection, Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Daumier and Van Gogh
One person who understood this well was Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). In 1882, he wrote to his brother Theo (1857–1891):
‘I’ve always believed him to be highly gifted, but it’s only recently that I begin to suspect that he’s of even greater importance than I thought. If you know anything special about him, or know of important things among his drawings, do write about them if you will. In the past I saw caricatures by him, and perhaps because of them got an idea about him that wasn’t the right one. His figures always struck me the most, but I believe that I know only a very small part of his work and that, for instance, the caricatures are definitely not his most typical or main work.’
As this quote suggests, Vincent van Gogh held Daumier in high regard. In numerous letters to Theo and to fellow artists such as Emile Bernard (1868–1941), he referred to Daumier’s work as a model for the modern, realistic and empathetic art he himself aspired to create. In September 1888, he asked Theo to comb the Parisian art market for lithographs by Daumier to hang in his studio at the Yellow House in Arles. Later that month, he wrote that he had received them and had hung them in the atelier. It is likely that the drawing now in the Van Gogh Museum also came into the brothers’ possession around this time, given that the bulk of their correspondence regarding Daumier dates to this period. Exactly where Theo purchased it remains unknown, though it is possible he acquired it at one of the auctions at Hôtel Drouot, where he was known to buy other drawings at low prices.
Van Gogh remained preoccupied with Daumier’s work even in the final months of his life. From the asylum in Saint-Rémy in early 1890, he painted copies after prints by his favourite artists, including Daumier’s woodcut The Four Ages of the Drinker (), which he had discovered in the magazine De Hollandsche Illustratie (). Much like Daumier, Van Gogh felt unrecognised. And, like Van Gogh, Daumier achieved full recognition only after his death: although admired by a small circle during his lifetime, he was canonised as an artistic genius in the decades following his death.
In 1888, the first monograph on Daumier’s life and work was published, written by Arsène Alexandre. It opens with a long essay in which Alexandre pleads for the re-evaluation of caricature as a true art form. Roger Fry (1866–1934), the influential British critic and advocate for modern art, described Daumier in 1922 as follows: ‘Of all the great men of the nineteenth century, he was the one whose genius was most shamefully wasted by society.’
Nina Reid
July 2026