Molière was the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), the French comic playwright and actor. Molière's savagely witty and fiercely moral portrayal of French society in the later half of the seventeenth-century in such plays as Le Tartuffe (1664), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1660), Le Malade Imaginaire (1673) and Le Misantrope (1666) were highly influential on English Restoration drama, which can be witnessed in the work of Dryden, Wycherley and Shadwell among others. The allusion to Le Misanthrope in Modern Painters I is one of many to Molière in Ruskin's oeuvre. (See Ruskin's admiration for Moliere.)