Artist Biography
Sulpice-Guillaume Chevallier, known as Gavarni, born in Paris on January 13, 1804 and died in Paris on November 23, 1866, was a French designer, watercolorist and lithographer.
He is the father of the painter Pierre Gavarni (1846-1932).
The son of a Parisian farmer, he adopted the pseudonym Gavarni after stays in the Pyrenees, particularly in Gavarnie. This pseudonym is sometimes, but wrongly, associated with the first name Paul.
Noticed by the Abbé de La Mésangère, he published in the Journal des dames et des modes, then collaborated with La Mode and other newspapers such as L'Artiste, L'Illustration, and its Spanish equivalent La Ilustración. His series of pipe smokers is particularly famous.
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In 1835, he became a regular contributor to Le Charivari, alongside Honoré Daumier. His full-page lithographs in this newspaper are recognized as major works by the artist. In the 1840s, he participated in the illustration of the work Les Français peints par eux-même by Léon Curmer, and collaborated with Grandville on the publications of Pierre-Jules Hetzel, such as Le Diable à Paris , bringing together texts by Balzac, George Sand and Charles Nodier.
He is the author of a unique literary collection, Les Douze mois , published in 1869. In 1852, he was named a knight of the Legion of Honor.
During his life, Gavarni lived in various places in Paris, including Montmartre and the Rue Saint-Lazare. He also spent a year in the debtors' prison on the Rue de Clichy in 1835-1836. He died at 29 Rue Chardon-Lagache, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, in November 1866, a few months after the death of his youngest son Jean, aged 10. Gavarni is buried in the Auteuil cemetery.
Known for his lithographic series such as Les Enfants terribles and Fourberies de femmes , Gavarni is distinguished by his mocking, sometimes bitter, look at Parisian society under Louis-Philippe and the Second Empire. He was very close to the Goncourt brothers, who admired him.
Gavarni also specialized in illustrating the Paris Carnival. A newspaper wrote, more than twenty years after his death: "Gavarni's words seem more and more accurate. - Carnival! he said, it doesn't exist, I invented it at a rate of fifty francs per drawing!"
Gavarni's works remain a precious testimony to Parisian society of his time, marked by a critical and often ironic gaze.
