He was a republican democrat (working class liberal), who satirized and lampooned the monarchy, politicians, the judiciary, lawyers, the bourgeoisie, as well as his countrymen and human nature in general.

He received some mentorship from Alexandre Lenoir, attended the Académie Suisse, learned lithography, and was producing advertisements, illustrations, and caricatures by the time he was twenty.

The French Third Republic granted him a pension in 1877, and the following year a major exhibition of his paintings was held in Paris, which received significant recognition in the final months of his life.

His father Jean-Baptiste was a glazier (corresponding nowadays to a framer), a poet and a minor playwright whose literary aspirations led him to move to Paris in 1814, followed by his wife and the young Daumier in 1816.

Although Daumier's father succeeded in publishing a book of verse and having an amateur troupe of actors perform his play in 1819, financial success was minimal and the family lived in poverty.

Later he found employment at Delaunay's, a well established bookstore at the Palais-Royal, a hub of Parisian life, where he began to meet artists, develop an interest in art, and started drawing.

Likewise, the art of the caricature, which was relatively established and popular in England (e.g. William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson), was just coming into vogue in France about this time.

Lithography studios were emerging in Paris to fill demands for inexpensive illustrated papers and periodicals in a time of social and political upheaval.

Daumier learned lithography from Charles Ramelet (1805–1851) and found work with Zéphirin Belliard (1798–1861), producing (often anonymously), miscellaneous illustrations, advertisements, street scenes, portraits, and caricatures in the mid to late 1820s, albeit honing his craft through the years.

After the "Three Glorious Days" of the July Revolution of 1830 (it is unknown if Daumier participated in actual street fighting), a number of new illustrated satirical journals emerged in Paris.

La Caricature invited Daumier to join its staff, a formidable group including Achille Devéria, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (J. J. Grandville), Auguste Raffet.

He was brought to court in February 1832 and charged with "inciting to hatred and contempt of the government and insulting the king"[2]: 39 p.  and sentenced to six months imprisonment with a fine of 500 francs.

Later that year, his cartoon The Court of King Pétaud (1832) was published and he was arrested at his parents apartment in August 1832 and placed in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie to serve his six months.

Daumier remained defiant in prison and wrote a number of letters indicating that he was producing lots of drawings "just to annoy the government.

[9]: 148 p. [8]: 66 p.  [12] After his release from prison on February 14, 1833, Daumier, who had been living with his parents up that time, moved into an artist phalanstery on Rue Saint-Denis, where his friends included Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Paul Huet, Philippe Auguste Jeanron, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Antoine-Augustin Préault.

[2]: 15 p. [9]: 148 p.  He resumed work at La Caricature and continued to publish critical and uncompromising lithographs including Rue Trensnonain, Freedom of the Press, and Past, Present, Future (all 1834) and spent long hours in the Louvre.

A couple of months later the "September Laws" were passed, which imposed drastically higher fines and longer, oppressive prison sentences for publications criticizing the king and his regime.

One author described the Ile-Saint-Louis at that time as "still a place apart, 'a little provincial town' in the midst of Paris", where toll bridges discouraged casual traffic and artists could find freedom and inexpensive rent.

Baudelaire contributed to a set of essays published in 1852 celebrating Daumier's lithographs and prints calling him "one of our leading men, not only in caricature, but in modern art.

About one hundred artist submitted sketches and designs anonymously to a jury that included Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Delaroche, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Philippe Auguste Jeanron, Alphonse de Lamartine, Ernest Meissonier, and Théophile Thoré-Bürger.

[9]: 150 p.  The following year, he received a commission for a painting from the Ministry of the Interior, via the Académie des Beau-Arts, requesting a sketch for approval, for a sum of 1,000 francs.

[2]: 31–32 p.  After 30 years of steadfast production, his caricatures were declining in popularity with the public, and in 1860 Le Charivari dropped him from their staff and ceased to publish his cartoons.

[2]: 31 p. [9]: 152 p.  By 1863 Daumier was selling his furniture to raise funds and he left the Ile-Saint-Louis and moved to a succession of lodgings and apartments in Montmartre, losing contact with many friends and associates.

It was not the financial success his friends had hoped for, but it was very well received by both the public and critics, and a decisive turning point in the perception of Daumier as an important painter.

Some of the subjects he repeatedly explored include: doctors, lawyers and the judicial system, theater and carnival subjects often in stage lighting (including actors, musicians, audiences, and backstage scenes), painters and sculpture in their studios, print and art collectors and connoisseurs, working people on the streets of Paris, the working class at leisure around a table (eating, drinking, playing chess), first and third class carriages, emigrants or refugees in flight, and Don Quixote.

Except for the searching truthfulness of his vision and the powerful directness of his brushwork, it would be difficult to recognize the creator of Robert Macaire, of Les Bas bleus, Les Bohémiens de Paris, and the Masques, in the paintings of Christ and His Apostles (Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam), or in his Good Samaritan, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ Mocked, or even in the sketches in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington.

Oliver W. Larkin states that "One sees in the clay the mark of Daumier's swift fingers as he nudged the skirt into windblown folds and used a knife blade or the end of a brush handle to define the clasped arms and the wrinkles of the cloth over the breast.

Daumier produced his social caricatures for Le Charivari, in which he held bourgeois society up to ridicule in the figure of Robert Macaire, hero of a popular melodrama.

Around the mid-1840s, Daumier started publishing his famous caricatures depicting members of the legal profession, known as 'Les Gens de Justice', a scathing satire about judges, defendants, attorneys and corrupt, greedy lawyers in general.

The profits were to promote freedom of the press and defrayed legal costs of a lawsuit against the satirical, politically progressive journal Le Charivari to which Daumier contributed regularly.