Nouveautés philantropiques (Robert Macaire series)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — stone-drawn, crayon-rich in its velvety blacks — shows two figures caught mid-swindle: the taller con-man Robert Macaire flourishes an absurdly ornate fabric before a wide-eyed dupe, stacked goods suggesting a fraudulent bazaar. Macaire's exaggerated jaw, wild hair, and theatrical pose are class caricature aimed squarely at bourgeois charlatanism, the philanthrope as grifter. Daumier published this in Le Charivari, France's satirical weekly, extending a tradition running from Hogarth's moral-series prints through Gillray's grotesques and Rowlandson's social comedies. The sequential Macaire series — recurring cast, recurring vice — is exactly the engine that would drive the comic strip: same character, episodic humiliation, panel-ready staging.