Je suis reçu!!… Refusé… les crétins!…

A lithograph by Honoré Daumier, from his long-running series mocking the annual Paris Salon jury. Two figures occupy the steps outside the exhibition hall: one man stands upright, hat tall, composure intact — accepted; the other hunches forward, nose nearly touching the rejection notice in his hands, muttering the caption's punchline: I'm in!!… Refused… the cretins!… The class markers are mild by Daumier's standards — bourgeois coats, no ethnic targeting — but the social sting is precise: artistic ambition meeting institutional gatekeeping. Daumier's lithographic line, scratchy and economical, descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's print-shop caricature tradition and feeds forward into the sequential comic strip. His serialized single-image gags in Le Charivari trained European readers to expect recurring characters, visual shorthand, and satirical punch in a cheap, reproducible format — the immediate ancestor of the comic page.