La charade

Honoré Daumier's *La charade* is a hand-colored lithograph — the industrial-era medium that made mass satirical print possible — showing two bourgeois men examining a document together, their faces rendered in Daumier's signature exaggerated physiognomy: bulbous noses, flushed cheeks, and rubbery expressions that owe a clear debt to Lavater's pseudoscientific physiognomy studies then fashionable in France. The caricature belongs to Daumier's extensive series skewering middle-class pretension and self-importance, published through Charles Philipon's satirical press. This tradition — running from Hogarth's narrative plates through Gillray's grotesques to Rowlandson's social comedies — established the sequential, character-driven visual storytelling that would migrate directly into the newspaper comic strip and eventually the comic book. Daumier alone produced over 4,000 lithographs, making him perhaps the single most important bridge between fine-art printmaking and the popular comics medium.