Le ventre législatif (The Legislative Belly)

Honoré-Victorin Daumier was the most celebrated and controversial caricaturists of his time and one of the great early practitioners of lithography. Born into humble circumstances, he began working at the age of twelve and only received a mostly informal training as an artist and printmaker. By the age of twenty, he was already eking out a precarious living by selling illustrations for commercial purposes and caricatures to magazines. A highly prolific artist in all media - he produced paintings, sculptures, drawings and over four thousand prints - his work as a painter was largely disregarded in his lifetime. As a caricaturist however he soon earned himself a reputation, and began to regularly publish in the satirical journals La Caricature and Le Charivari, both run by Charles Philipon (1800–1861), who owned a large print workshop and lithographic presses in Paris. Although the journals and Daumier's contributions lampooned all manner of cultural and social events and phenomena, and human folly in general, the main target of their political satire was Louis Philippe I, who had been proclaimed King of France (or 'King of the French', as he styled himself) after the July Revolution in 1830. Faithful to his working class background and in keeping with the sentiments of the more progressive sections of French society, Daumier felt that the revolution had been appropriated and repurposed by the new king and the haute bourgeoisie for their own gains. Many of his caricatures are fierce satires of what he saw as Louis Philippe's corrupt reign, and both Daumier and the printer Philipon were charged with 'contempt of government' and for 'insulting the King', and sentenced on several occasions to fines and even imprisonment. One of his most notorious caricatures depicts Louis Philippe as Gargantua (1831), being fed with the taxes of the masses, while shitting privileges and favors for his cronies. Although Le ventre législatif is not quite as acerbic a satire and not a personal attack on the King, it is the quintessential depiction of a vacuous and self-serving regime, and one of Daumier's most memorable and emblematic images. At the time of its publication, it would have undoubtedly had more bite, as the characters depicted on the benches of the Chambre des députés would have been as recognizable to the general public then as today's politicians are to us.