Untitled (Study of a Figure with Pipe)

This pen-and-ink sketch by Felix Randel depicts a rotund male figure smoking a long pipe, rendered in the exaggerated proportions characteristic of early 20th-century caricature. The artist employs bold line work and selective stippling to model form, techniques descended from the 18th- and 19th-century print traditions of Gillray and Daumier. The figure's oversized facial features and corpulent body type reflect period conventions of physical caricature used to satirize social types—here possibly targeting bourgeois excess or political figures of the era. The sketch's informal character suggests working studies that comic artists and illustrators of the period used to develop character types for publication, establishing visual conventions that would inform the emerging comic strip and commercial illustration industries of the 1920s and beyond.