Père de famille, inspirant de bonne heure à ses enfants l'admiration et le respect des belles choses…

A lithograph from Daumier's Croquis Parisiens series (plate 32), printed in the crayon-manner style that made him the dominant caricaturist of the July Monarchy and Second Empire. The scene is deceptively gentle: a rotund bourgeois father in top hat and heavy overcoat steers his wife and two small children before a charcuterie or épicerie window lettered CHARCUTERIE, pressing the youngest child toward the glass. The caption's mock-heroic irony — père inspiring admiration for "beautiful things" that are merely sausages and pâtés — targets middle-class pretension and material appetite. Daumier's swelling, ink-washed figures recall Rowlandson's corpulent tradesmen and anticipate the sequential domestic comedy panels that Töpffer and later newspaper strip artists would systematize into comics.