Honoré Daumier

Gargantua, lithograph for La Caricature, December 1831 The young Honoré Daumier drew King Louis-Philippe as Rabelais's insatiable giant, enthroned and gulping down bags of coins hauled up a ramp to his mouth by tiny laborers. The French state took the joke personally. Daumier and his publisher were tried in February 1832, fined and sentenced to six months in Sainte-Pélagie prison. That sentence is what makes the print historic: it is an early, vivid case of a government treating a caricature as a threat, and of an artist whose career only grew from the punishment.