Je suis un honnête homme! — Cham, 1866

A pen-and-ink beach cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé), likely reproduced as a wood engraving for a French illustrated periodical. Two figures face each other on a shoreline: a stout, turbaned bathing attendant — drawn with the broad, exaggerated features typical of working-class caricature in Second Empire France — confronts a comically skeletal bourgeois woman. The caption delivers the joke: he quoted her a price when she was dressed; now undressed, she is half the work. The class humor cuts both ways, mocking attendant avarice and fashionable female vanity simultaneously. Cham worked squarely in the tradition running from Daumier's Charivari lithographs through the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets — sequential, captioned, disposable printed humor whose rhythm of image and speech balloon is the direct ancestor of the comic strip.