Don quixote watercolor by paul gavarni images for sale

The story is told that he took his name from Gavarnie in Luz-Saint-Sauveur, where he had taken a journey into the Pyrenees. His first published drawings were for the magazine Le Journal des Dames et des Modes. At the time, Gavarni was barely years old. His sharp and witty drawings gave these generally commonplace and unartistic figures a life-likeness and an expression which soon won him a name in fashionable circles.

Aquarelle painting by Paul Gavarni, titled "La Leçon de Paysage," circa midth century; overall good condition; pain.

He gradually gave greater attention to this more congenial work, and ultimately stopped working as an engineer to become the director of Journal Des Gens du Monde. Gavarni followed his interests and began a series of lithographed sketches in which he portrayed the most striking characteristics, foibles and vices of the various classes of French society.

The letterpress explanations attached to his drawings were short, but were forcible and humorous, if sometimes trivial, and were adapted to the particular subjects. At first, he confined himself to the study of Parisian manners, more especially those of the Parisian youth. Most of his best work appeared in Le Charivari. Some of his most scathing and most earnest pictures, the fruit of a visit to London, appeared in L'Illustration.

He had now ceased to be the director of Des Gens du monde but he was engaged as an ordinary caricaturist of Le Charivari and, while making the fortune of the paper, he made his own. His name was exceedingly popular and his illustrations for books were eagerly sought for by publishers.

Paul Gavarni, Reading the News, Original Lithograph, for $ (1/30/).

A single frontispiece or vignette was sometimes enough to secure the sale of a new book. Always desiring to enlarge the field of his observations, Gavarni soon abandoned his once-favorite topics. He no longer limited himself to such types as the Lorette and the Parisian student or to the description of the noisy and popular pleasures of the capital but turned his mirror to the grotesque sides of family life and of humanity at large.

But while showing the same power of irony as his former works, enhanced by a deeper insight into human nature, they generally bear the stamp of a bitter and even sometimes gloomy philosophy. At one point Gavarni was imprisoned for debt in the debtors' prison of Clichy.