Honoré Daumier, *Les Joueurs d'échecs* (The Chess Players)

Two elderly men lean over a chess board in a dim interior, one with fist pressed to bearded chin in concentrated thought, the other — seen from behind, bald and heavyset — poised to move. This is oil or chalk study rather than a printed caricature: Daumier working in the painterly vein he pursued alongside his lithographic journalism. His lithographs for Le Charivari established the visual grammar — compressed figures, expressive silhouette, social type over individual — that runs directly into the comic strip. Here the 'type' is the bourgeois amateur, ridiculous in his absorption. No ethnic caricature operates; the satire is mild class comedy about men who treat a parlor game with the gravity of statecraft.