Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College

The Human Comedy: Chronicles of 19th-Century France

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Joseph Prudhomme

JOSEPH PRUDHOMME If Robert Macaire represented the money-grubbing of the July Monarchy (1830–48), Joseph Prudhomme represent-ed the superficiality, conformism, and materialism of the Second Empire (1852–70). The emblematic type of the self-satisfied bourgeois, Prudhomme was first developed by Daumier’s friend, the writer, caricaturist, and actor Henri Monnier. He then became a ubiquitous figure in popular culture, recognizable by his signature malapropisms and platitudes. Monnier once described him as representing “pompous incompetence.” Daumier made numerous prints depicting Prudhomme as a pot-bellied, tight-fisted bore with intellectual faculties as dull as his tastes. Balzac saw in Prudhomme the ultimate Parisian bourgeois, and Gustave Flaubert likely used Mr. Prudhomme as a model for his infuriating apothecary, Mr. Homais, from Madame Bovary (1857). As critical of the bourgeoisie as Daumier and Flaubert both were, they confessed to being hopelessly bourgeois themselves. Perhaps this irony explains their comic treatment of the type.


  1. Des huîtres

    Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879) Des huîtres à vingt-cinq sous la douzaine quelle horreur !... (Twenty-five cents for a doz…

  2. Modification du costume parisien

    Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879) Modification du costume parisien.... (A Change in Parisian Fashion...), 1856 Lithograph Gif…

  3. Mr. Prudhomme

    Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879) Mr. Prudhomme philantrope (Mr. Prudhomme the Philanthropist), 1856 Lithograph Gift of Eugene…