Nouveautés philantropiques (Robert Macaire series)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — stone-drawn, crayon-rich in its velvety blacks — shows two figures caught mid-swindle: the taller con-man Robert Macaire flourishes an absurdly ornate fabric before a wide-eyed dupe, stacked goods suggesting a fraudulent bazaar. Macaire's exaggerated jaw, wild hair, and theatrical pose are class caricature aimed squarely at bourgeois charlatanism, the *philanthrope* as grifter. Daumier published this in *Le Charivari*, France's satirical weekly, extending a tradition running from Hogarth's moral-series prints through Gillray's grotesques and Rowlandson's social comedies. The sequential Macaire series — recurring cast, recurring vice — is exactly the engine that would drive the comic strip: same character, episodic humiliation, panel-ready staging.