Portrait of Henri Bonaventure Monnier

Paul Gavarni was among the finest watercolorists of the nineteenth century and he is equally celebrated as a master of lithography. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), Baudelaire referred to Gavarni as a “veritable monument;” he concurred with his contemporaries that the works of Gavarni and Daumier should be considered the visual complements to Balzac’s literary masterpiece, La Comédie humaine. The museum owns some 150 lithographs, four watercolors, and one lithographic stone by Gavarni, as well as some thirty works by Monnier.