Le public, mon cher…est stupide…

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, drawn directly on stone for mass-press reproduction — shows two top-hatted bourgeois men grasping each other's lapels in a crowded public square, their faces exaggerated into bulbous noses and jutting chins characteristic of physiognomic caricature inherited from Lavater and pushed to grotesque extremes by Gillray and Rowlandson before Daumier refined it into something more psychologically precise. The crowd behind them is rendered as an anonymous gray mass, the 'stupid public' the title mocks. Daumier published hundreds of such prints in La Caricature and Le Charivari, continuing a tradition running from Hogarth's narrative moral plates through Gillray's political venom — a lineage of sequential, captioned, printed satire from which the comic strip directly descends.