(Royal Academy, London, until 26 January 2014)

The Royal Academy’s autumn exhibition, nestled up in the Sackler Wing, turns the focus onto Daumier, one of the liveliest and most irrepressible artists of the 19th century. He has always fallen slightly outside my comfort zone and, when I first began looking at his art some years ago, I had the impression that there was something rather hard and cutting about it. That’s probably because I was most familiar with his lithographs, laced with political satire, whereas this show presents a survey of his whole career, deliberately looking beyond the caricatures to bring to light the vein of human sympathy running through his art.

Continue reading →