Honoré Daumier was a French painter and printmaker best known for his caricatures critiquing and satirizing society and politics in 19th-century France. His two most famous characters were the bourgeois Robert Macaire and the evil Ratapoil, each depicted with grotesquely exaggerated features. Born on February 26, 1808 in Marseille, France, the artist went on study at the Académie Suisse followed by a stint working for the Belliard publishing house, where he first learned lithography. During the rule of Louis Phillipe, he was imprisoned for his infamous depiction of the king as Gargantua (the gluttonous giant in François Rabelais’ novel) in the magazine La Caricature. Charles Baudelaire once said of Daumier that he was, “one of the most important men, I will not say only of caricature, but also of Modern Art.” Daumier’s works are in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, among others. Daumier died on February 10, 1879 in Valmondois, France.
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