Macaire héritier — philantrope

Honoré Daumier's lithograph—crayon rubbed directly onto limestone, then inked and pulled on a hand press—shows two men in a bourgeois interior: a lean, wary figure standing at left and the sprawling Robert Macaire at right, half-collapsed on a chaise longue, grinning upward with the elastic, predatory charm of a born swindler. Macaire, the era's stock theatrical con-man, was Daumier's vehicle for lampooning the get-rich speculator class that flourished under Louis-Philippe's July Monarchy. The class caricature is deliberate and sharp: Macaire's rumpled grandeur mocks new-money pretension, his body language an exaggerated pantomime readable to working Parisians who bought cheap lithographic prints at the stalls. Daumier sits squarely in the line from Hogarth's moral sequences and Gillray's grotesques to the sequential newspaper panels that would become the comic strip.