*Conseil de Guerre* (The War Council)

A file of the barely-living shuffles toward a doorway lettered Conseil de Guerre, war council. They are wasted to sinew and shroud, one striding figure flinging out an arm to point the way, a starved child hurrying at the rear, a blind head turned up behind. Daumier drew this in the bitter aftermath of France's 1870 defeat, imagining the war's dead and ruined summoned as witnesses against those who made it. He works in ink and smudged wash, the blacks pooled, the outlines nervous, closer to Goya than to a joke. By now in his sixties, Daumier had spent forty years in the satirical press and could compress an argument into a few gaunt bodies. There is no caption gag here. The picture indicts, and expects the viewer to feel the charge.