Cristi...v'là-t-y un boeuf qui est bien fait!...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, drawn directly on stone and printed in mass editions for the Paris press — depicts a crowd of bourgeois salon-goers packed before a painting at the 1859 Exposition. The men wear identical top hats and heavy coats; their bodies are rendered with the exaggerated girth and self-satisfaction Daumier reserved for the prosperous middle class. The caption, in working-class argot, has one figure praising a painted ox as if it were alive, then announcing he'll buy a lottery ticket and put his companion in an étable alongside a cow. The joke lands on bourgeois philistinism: men who look like livestock admiring livestock. Daumier's serial caricature work — thousands of images for Le Charivari — is the direct institutional ancestor of the newspaper comic strip.