This is Where the Lecture of the Constitutionnel Might Take You, plate 8 from Pastorales 1845

Honoré Daumier created "This is Where the Lecture of the Constitutionnel Might Take You" using lithography. The composition, rendered in shades of black and white, stages an encounter between civilization and nature. Daumier captures a bourgeois gentleman in a top hat, knee deep in a pond as he scrutinizes graffiti on a tree trunk. The tree, a symbol of nature, juxtaposes with the defacement of urban markings, while the water suggests a reflective space, perhaps a metaphor for intellectual contemplation gone astray. The textures created by Daumier’s lithographic technique invite us to consider the semiotic systems at play. The graffiti acts as a signifier of societal decay intruding upon the natural world. What does it mean to impose human marks on nature? Is Daumier critiquing society's tendency to impose its structures on the organic world? The tension between the wild and the civilized is held together by the artist's hand, and remains a subject of reinterpretation.