For a long time, all Honoré Daumier (1808-79) meant to me were the prints in my father’s office. Like many of his fellow physicians, at least the cultivated ones with leftist pedigrees from the 1930s, my father had a small group of Daumier’s savage comments on the nineteenth-century medical profession on display. (If he had been a lawyer, like some of my school friends’ parents, they would have been the caricatures of judges and barristers; dentists, for some reason, favored dancers and pensive young women—working-class, of course—by the Soyer brothers.) As a child I didn’t like the images much, and I was puzzled by how they were always described as “real” when they were so clearly cut from some magazine or newspaper. I recall, too, struggling with the captions, full of odd contractions that I’d never seen in my French books and words that, even when I could find them in the Larousse, didn’t make much sense in context; they certainly weren’t funny the way I expected cartoons to be. I remember clearly how surprised I was when I discovered that the caricaturist Daumier was also a painter. Was it at the Met or in a high-school art history class? I remember liking the economical little sketches of laundresses, with their clear, massive forms, better than the caricatures, and not liking The Third-Class Carriageeven though the teachers at Music and Art, politically correct for the time, praised it highly for its sympathetic treatment of the impoverished and downtrodden