Cham

• Born 1818-01-26 · Died 1879-09-06

Charles Amédée de Noé was a French caricaturist and lithographer. Raised by a family who wished for him to attend a polytechnic school, he instead attended painting workshops hosted by Nicolas Charlet and Paul Delaroche and began work as a cartoonist. He eventually took up the pseudonym of "Cham". Amédée de Noé is the grandson of Louis Pantaléon de Noé, born in Cap-Haïtien in Saint-Domingue, and the son of Louis, Count of Noah and peer of France , who was also a talented designer and caricaturist. In 1839, he published his first book, Monsieur Lajaunisse, which began a career that would span 40,000 drawings. In 1843, he began to be published in newspapers like Le Charivari, a publication where he was on staff for thirty years. He often used sequential images to tell narrative stories. He also published several caricature albums such as Proudhon en voyage and the Comic History of the National Assembly. Cham made a specialty of caricatures on the subject of the Paris Carnival, such as his Descente de la Courtille, Bœuf Gras, and Mi-Carême. The reputation of Cham, "the Offenbach of caricature", according to Arsène Alexandre, was considerable during his lifetime. "His Parisian spirit without malice enchanted the bourgeoisie during the Second Empire to the point that the readers of [Charivari] preferred his drawings to those of Daumier." He died in Paris of tuberculosis in 1879.