L'Oncle–Le Neveu

Honoré Daumier's lithograph sets two caricatured male heads face-to-face: the uncle, coatless and wild-mouthed, apparently pleading poverty; the nephew, top-hatted and smugly grinning, unmoved by the appeal. Daumier amplifies bourgeois physiognomy to grotesque extremes—protruding chins, exaggerated noses, slack jaws—a technique rooted in Lavater's physiognomy and carried forward from Gillray's English political prints into French satirical journalism. Published in the lithographic press that made Parisian caricature a mass medium, this sheet belongs to the tradition of sequential social types—German Bilderbogen, Rowlandson's comic pairs—that directly shaped the panel-by-panel grammar of the comic strip. The class mockery is pointed and unsentimental: the poor relation is rendered ridiculous alongside the self-satisfied heir, with no sympathy extended to either.