1835
Honoré Victorin Daumier French, 1808-1879
France
In this print Daumier transformed an actual event from Louis Philippe’s years in exile in America (1796–99) into a bawdy bedroom farce. To thank him for successfully providing medical aid to a member of his tribe, a Native American chief invited Louis Philippe to sleep between his grandmother and great aunt—an offer he could not politely refuse. The depiction of Native Americans as tattooed and sagging figures with eager sexual appetites reflects 19th-century racial prejudices and inverts the bourgeois societal and bodily ideals signaled by the pile of discarded European clothing on the left.
Lithograph in black on off-white wove paper