Préparation au Baccalauréat

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — the dominant medium of French popular satire after 1820, cheap to produce and razor-sharp in line — shows a tutor and his student locked in the ritual agony of baccalauréat preparation. The seated pupil faces a gesticulating examiner whose exasperation reads in every exaggerated limb; Daumier's characteristic bulbous noses and rubbery anatomy belong to a physiognomic caricature tradition that coded class and intellect onto the body, here skewering bourgeois educational anxiety rather than ethnic identity. The scene sits squarely in the lineage running from Rowlandson's social comedies through Daumier's own Les Robert Macaire series — sequential, character-driven, captioned print satire that directly trained the visual grammar Töpffer and later comic-strip artists would formalize into the panel page.