In a moment when the repression of political ideas is resurgent, the art of Honoré Daumier offers a powerful example of creative resistance in the face of stifling censorship. Most famous as a political cartoonist who gained early notoriety for being jailed for a caricature of the king, Daumier continued to test the electric fence of shifting censorship laws with experimental portrait strategies and subversive reinterpretations of seventeenth-century literature. Daumier’s engagement with seventeenth-century texts emerged from the same commitment to political dissent as his work caricaturing the contemporary world and intensified in periods when political material was censored in the illustrated press. My forthcoming book with Manchester University Press, Art against censorship: Honoré Daumier, comedy, and resistance in 19th-century France, examines Daumier’s deep and abiding engagement with Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, and Miguel de Cervantes in sculpture, print, and painting, contextualizing his citations within the broader popular revivals of these authors who were masters of dissimulation and critique in their own time. The artworks examined in this book functioned as critiques of the repressive authority of the government in large part because their publics understood Daumier’s appropriation of La Fontaine, Molière, and Cervantes as coded forms of subversive dissent. The authors offered vital representational strategies to the visual arts, and their famous characters, narratives, and motifs allowed Daumier to filter his political statements through a newly glorified literary past. Literature, theatre, and politics converge in Daumier’s oeuvre in a way that is unique in art history, demonstrating the force of the artist’s role in broader stories of image-text relationships and subversive political expression.