Daumier was born in Marseille, France in 1808.  He worked as a delivery boy in his youth, and began sketching in his spare time.  He learned the art of lithography, quickly found work designing advertisements and making plates for publishers.  He began working at the journal La Caricature, where he frequently criticized the bourgeois class in Paris, and was imprisoned for six months for satirizing the king in 1832.  Following the discontinuation of La Caricature, Daumier found work at Le Charivari, where he continued to produce scathing political commentary in the form of caricatures.

Daumier was also a painter, and is known as one of the pioneers of the naturalism movement.  Since he was known as the “Michelangelo of caricature,” he was not successful as a painter.  However, when his works were collected at a gallery in France, he became more renowned as a painter.  In 1900, he was posthumously honored with an exhibition of his work at the École de Beaux-Arts.  Today, his works can be found in museums such as the Louvre in France, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Daumier eventually went blind, and died in Valmondois, France, in 1879.