Regardez donc un peu où ils ont niché mon cadre!

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, drawn directly on stone for the popular press — depicts a crowded Salon gallery, walls stacked floor-to-ceiling with paintings in the academic mise au carré hang. A bourgeois gentleman gestures theatrically upward toward his own tiny canvas, nearly invisible near the ceiling, while companions crane their necks. The caption has him insisting the placement is an outrage, yet admitting he should feel honored to hang near Meissonier. Daumier spent decades puncturing middle-class pretension and institutional pomposity for Le Charivari, working in the same acidic comic tradition — Hogarth's moral sequences, Gillray's grotesques, Rowlandson's crowd scenes — that would feed directly into the narrative panel sequences of the modern comic strip. His figures are typed by class gesture and costume rather than ethnic caricature, the satire aimed squarely at bourgeois vanity and the Salon's brutal jury system.