Ovide Rémilly

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his *Les Représentants Représentés* series depicts député Ovide Rémilly striding across the Place de la Concorde, his head grotesquely enlarged in the exaggerated tradition of French physiognomic caricature — the cranium ballooned, the jaw set with self-importance. Behind him, a pack of dogs nips at his heels, a direct joke at his expense: the caption records that he had just deposited a proposal to tax dogs at the National Assembly. Daumier worked for the satirical press *Le Charivari*, drawing on Gillray's venom and Rowlandson's physical comedy while sharpening both into a distinctly republican French idiom. His sequential portrait series of legislators — cheap, widely circulated lithographic sheets — are a direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel character types and visual shorthand.