À travers les ateliers

A lithograph from Daumier's long-running series satirizing Parisian artistic and bourgeois life, this print shows a cluster of men crowding an artist's studio, craning necks and gesturing with exaggerated enthusiasm before a canvas just out of view. The caption — Fichtre!… Épatant!… Sapristi!… Superbe!… ça parle! — skewers the performative rapture of amateur critics and salon hangers-on, their rubbery faces rendered in Daumier's signature bold crayon line, exploiting lithography's tonal range for expressive shadow and bulk. The figures display the class-coded physiognomy standard to 19th-century French caricature: bourgeois types flattened into social types. Daumier sits squarely in the tradition that runs from Hogarth's narrative print sequences and Gillray's grotesques through to the sequential panel storytelling that would eventually produce the modern comic strip.