8 heures du matin (8 O'Clock in the Morning)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — from his serial La Journée du Célibataire (A Bachelor's Day) — depicts a gaunt, nightcap-wearing bachelor tending his windowsill plants, broom tucked under one arm, a small dog eyeing him from the floor. The figure's exaggerated nose and hunched posture belong to Daumier's habitual class caricature: the urban petit-bourgeois rendered absurd in domestic incompetence, a man without a wife reduced to performing 'women's work.' Printed by Aubert & Cie for Le Charivari, Paris's illustrated satirical journal, the image descends directly from Rowlandson and Gillray's sequential comic prints and anticipates the newspaper comic strip: recurring characters, serial episodes, speech-adjacent captions. Daumier's lithographic output — thousands of panels across decades — is among the most direct ancestors of the modern comic page.