Le Bambillon (Red Mullet; or Le Barbillon entraîne la ligne, The Fish Pulls the Line)
Honore Daumier (1808-1879), Le Bambillon (Red Mullet; or Le Barbillon entraîne la ligne, The Fish Pulls the Line), lithograph, 1840-41, [with initials in the plate]. Reference: Daumier Register 818, second state (of 2), with the letters, Plate 4 from LA PÊCHE, in the published form in Caricature, a sur blanc impression, in very good condition, with margins, on wove paper, 8 1/4 x 6 3/8, the sheet 14 x 9 1/2 inches, archival matting.
A fine clear impression.
This is a sur blanc impression, printed in a small contemporaneous edition for collectors (probably 100-150 impressions only). This form of the print was and generally is preferred over the newprint impressions for a number of reasons – the paper is better quality, one doesn’t see newsprint through the image because there’s no newsprint verso (that’s why they call it sur blanc), and of course it’s just rarer than the newsprint editions – and for all these reasons the sur blancs do have the drawback of being more costly than the newprint versions (although the price difference is minimal given the other differences).
The text of this print, stolen unabashedly from the indispensable Daumier Register, reads as follows:
Original Text:
Le Barbillon entraîne la ligne, notre homme se penche, le pied lui glisse, et voilà le pêcheur qu’on repêche.
Translation:
The fish pulls the line… our man bends down, his foot slips and there goes our fisherman… ready to be fished out.
$275