File...file...Moellon! vla le municipal!...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, worked in crayon on stone for mass reproduction — catches two half-dressed working-class men sprinting from the Seine's public baths (Bains d'Hommes, 4 sous), their clothes bundled under their arms, a small dog scrambling alongside. A uniformed municipal officer stands his ground at right; fashionable spectators watch from an upper gallery. The comedy turns on class: the poor man's cheap river-bath is policed while the bourgeois look on. Daumier, prosecuted for his caricatures of Louis-Philippe, worked in the tradition running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson and Gillray — sequential satirical images sold as popular prints — a direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel storytelling and typed social figures.