GAVARNI, PAUL (1804-1866), pseudonym of HIPPOLYTE SULPICE-GUILLAUME CHEVALIER, French caricaturist, born in Paris, Jan. 13, 1804. In 1833 he founded the Journal des Gens du monde, and began a series of lithographed sketches, in which he portrayed the striking characteristics, the foibles and vices of the various classes of French society. The letter-press explanations attached to his drawings were short, forcible and highly humorous. The different stages through which Gavarni's talent passed, are well worth being noted. At first he confined himself to the study of Parisian manners, more especially those of the Parisian youth. He was engaged as caricaturist of Le Cjiarivari. Many im portant publications owed a great part of their success to the clever and telling sketches contributed by Gavarni.
Always desiring to enlarge the field of his observations, Gavarni no longer limited himself to such types as the lorette and the Parisian student, or to the description of the noisy and popular pleasures of the capital, but turned his mirror to the grotesque sides of family life and of humanity. Whilst showing the same power of irony as his former works, enhanced by a deeper insight into human nature, Gavarni's compositions of this time generally bear the stamp of a bitter philosophy. He returned from a visit to London in 1849 deeply impressed with the scenes of misery and degradation which he had observed among the lower classes of that city. What he had witnessed there became the almost exclusive subject of his drawings, as powerful, as impressive as ever. Most of these last compositions appeared in the weekly paper L'Illustration. In 1857 he published in one volume the series entitled Masques et visages (I2mo.), and in 1869, about two years of ter his death, his last artistic work, Les Douze Mois (I vol. fol.). Gavarni was much engaged, during the last period of his life, in scientific pursuits. He sent several communica tions to the Academie des Sciences, and till his death on Nov. 23, 1866, he was eagerly interested in mathematical questions.
Gavarni's Oeuvres choisies were edited in (4 vols. 4to) with letterpress by J. Janin, Th. Gautier and Balzac, followed in 185o by two other volumes named Perles et parures; and some essays in prose and in verse written by him were published by Ch. Yriarte, in 1869. See also E. and J. de Goncourt, Gavarni, l'homme et l'oeuvre (1873, 8vo) ; Henri Frantz and Octave Uzanne, Daumier and Gavarni (special studio edition 1906). J. Claretie has devoted an essay to Gavarni. A catalogue raisonne of Gavarni's works was published by J. Armelhault and E. Bocher (Paris, 1873, 8vo) .