Robert Macaire renait de ses cendres

Honoré Daumier's lithograph shows three figures locked in comic confrontation: a rotund bourgeois behind a counter clutches papers with smug authority, while the central charlatan — Robert Macaire, arms flung wide in theatrical outrage — dominates the space between him and a lean, cringing accomplice. Macaire's exaggerated jawline and wild gesture are classic Daumier physiognomy: class caricature rooted in the era's pseudo-scientific belief that skull shape and facial angle revealed character, used here to mock the swindling entrepreneur as social type rather than individual. The lithograph belongs to Daumier's Robert Macaire series for Le Charivari, extending a satirical print tradition running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson and Gillray. These sequential character studies — same figure, recurring vice, new scheme — are direct ancestors of the recurring comic-strip protagonist.