L'inconvénient de se faire bichonner...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — the medium he wielded with unmatched authority in Le Charivari — shows a fashionably dressed gentleman recoiling in theatrical horror as a barber or hairdresser, draped in white and crowned with an absurd floral headdress, looms toward him with clawing hands. The joke targets Parisian bourgeois vanity: the inconvenience of being primped. Daumier exaggerates physiognomy in the tradition running from Gillray's grotesque politicians through Rowlandson's social comedies — caricature as class commentary delivered through distorted jaw and bulging eye. The working-class service figure is rendered physically comic in ways typical of the period's hierarchy of bodies. Such single-image narrative panels, serialized in illustrated press, are the direct ancestors of the comic strip sequence that followed decades later.