Mon char, mes javelots… (Phèdre)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph belongs to his Physionomies tragico-classiques series, which mocked the pompous conventions of French classical theatre. Here two figures enact a scene from Racine's Phèdre: a grotesque male figure — hook-nosed, slack-jawed, arrow-quivered, leaning with comic desperation — courts a coolly indifferent woman draped in white. The male face carries the exaggerated ethnic distortion Daumier routinely applied to comic targets; by 1841 such physiognomic shorthand was standard satirical currency, rooted in Lavater's pseudoscience. Printed by lithography — Daumier's chosen medium for its speed and tonal richness — this sheet descends directly from the theatrical burlesque prints of Rowlandson and feeds forward into the sequential comic strip: repeated character types, visual punchline, text below image, numbered series.