Que diable, Monsieur, ne bougez donc pas...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, printed in Paris by Aubert — shows a painter hunched at a canvas while his exaggeratedly jowled, pug-nosed sitter squirms in a chair. The caption reads Que diable, Monsieur, ne bougez donc pas la main (roughly, "Devil take it, sir, stop moving your hand"). The sitter's distorted physiognomy is typical of Daumier's Croquis d'expressions series: bourgeois pomposity rendered as animal grotesque, a tradition running from Hogarth's social tableaux through Gillray's political grotesques and Rowlandson's comic genre scenes. French censorship laws of the 1830s pushed Daumier from direct political targets toward social "types," but the class mockery remained intact. These serialized lithographic sheets — cheap, widely circulated — are a direct ancestor of the sequential comic panel.