Henry Monnier (1805–1877) was a popular artist, writer, and actor in 19th-century Paris. Depicted here by his friend, the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, he was best known for withering satires on the French middle class, epitomized by the portly and small-minded character of M. Prudhomme. The novelist Honoré de Balzac, for whom Monnier illustrated parts of the Comédie humaine (1842–1848), considered him the “personification of irony.” But Charles Baudelaire bitingly mocked Monnier’s artistic and theatrical achievements. “Like Caesar, he fulfilled three functions at once—those of actor, writer, and caricaturist…His talent is essentially a bourgeois one. As an actor he was cold and precise; as a writer captious; and as an artist, he had discovered a method of doing his ‘chic’ from nature.”