Émile Vésin

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his Les Représentants représentés series depicts Émile Vésin, a deputy of the French Legislative Assembly, rendered as a squat, bald figure seated cross-legged on a bench, his oversized head creased into a permanent scowl. The French caption beneath mocks Vésin's provincial vanity — his finest day, it suggests, will be sitting in the Assembly wearing the robe he once paraded under the Empire to impress the women of Macon. Daumier inherited the physiognomic distortion of Gillray and Rowlandson and pushed it toward democratic accountability: bourgeois politicians, not kings, are the targets. This tradition of sequential caricature sheets — the single panel that implies narrative — fed directly into the comic strip's vocabulary of compressed character and satirical compression.