Ovide Rémilly

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his Les Représentants Représentés series depicts député Ovide Rémilly striding across the Place de la Concorde, his head grotesquely enlarged in the exaggerated tradition of French physiognomic caricature — the cranium ballooned, the jaw set with self-importance. Behind him, a pack of dogs nips at his heels, a direct joke at his expense: the caption records that he had just deposited a proposal to tax dogs at the National Assembly. Daumier worked for the satirical press Le Charivari, drawing on Gillray's venom and Rowlandson's physical comedy while sharpening both into a distinctly republican French idiom. His sequential portrait series of legislators — cheap, widely circulated lithographic sheets — are a direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel character types and visual shorthand.