The French caricaturist Honoré Daumier was also painter and sculptor. His works are an amazing visual critic and registry of French society of the XIX century.

The Parisian public rightly admired Honoré Daumier as the newspaper caricaturist who so perceptively skewered their daily lives, but they never accepted him as a painter. Daumier died blind and a pauper without ever having received a painting commission.
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He ridiculed the bourgeoisie and the legal system and unsentimentally showed the misery of the masses with his crayon, much as Charles Dickens observed London in words.

For more information about Honoré see Honoré Daumier and His Lithographic Work, a dedicated site of his life and works, and this, this, this, this and this site.

For a brief story of caricatures of Parisian life see the on-line exhibition Comic Art:The Paris Salon in Caricature. (via scribblingwoman)