L'agent de change, après la Bourse

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — the dominant satirical medium of July Monarchy France — shows a stock broker or exchange agent, top-hatted and self-important, gesturing theatrically at a desk-bound clerk whose face is rendered in Daumier's characteristic physiognomic exaggeration: jutting jaw, heavy brow, the pseudo-scientific caricature vocabulary inherited from Lavater and Lebrun that Daumier weaponized against the bourgeoisie and financial class. The scene skewers post-Bourse posturing, the smug theatre of money men explaining themselves. Daumier sits squarely in the lineage running from Hogarth's moral series through Gillray's political grotesques to the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets — sequential, populist, printed cheap — the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel visual storytelling and the caricatured stock characters comics would inherit wholesale.