Devils Besiege a Man's Head, Symbolising Headache

A seated man clutches his head in agony while a swarm of small demons—hammering bells, blowing horns, pulling ropes—assault him from every angle. The caption reads Le mal de tête (The Headache). This lithograph, drawn by Honoré Daumier and transferred to stone by C. Ramelet, belongs to Daumier's early comic series L'Imagination (No. 9), in which interior mental states are rendered as visible, physical invasions. The printmaking is fluid and gestural—hallmarks of lithography's capacity for spontaneous line that made it the democratic medium of Parisian popular satire. Daumier stood squarely in the tradition running from Hogarth's narrative sequences and Gillray's grotesques through to the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets; his multi-panel comic logic of cause, suffering, and absurd consequence fed directly into the sequential art that became the comic strip.