Le lendemain de noces (The Morning After the Wedding)

A lithograph from Daumier's Croquis d'expressions series, published in the French satirical press. A working-class woman — kerchiefed, hands clasped in theatrical supplication or glee — kneels beside a curtained bed where a figure lies prone. The scene mocks bourgeois and working-class marital life with the broad physiognomic exaggeration Daumier inherited from Lavater's physiognomy craze and refined into something distinctly modern: the woman's grin is cartoonishly elongated, her class marked by dress and posture. This is precisely the lithographic caricature tradition — Philipon's Le Charivari, Daumier's serial panels, the German Bilderbogen sheets — that taught narrative sequencing, recurring character types, and visual punch lines directly to the first comic strip artists of the 1890s.