Les Baigneurs (The Bathers)

A lithograph by Honoré Daumier published in the French satirical press, depicting a crowded, chaotic scene of Parisian bathers in the Seine. The figures—men of various body types, ages, and apparent social classes—splash, shove, and sprawl in murky water beside a wooden bathing pontoon. Daumier's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic, his crayon strokes building volume through shadow rather than line. The caption identifies the Seine as a river crossing the Manche into England. This sheet belongs directly to the lithographic satire tradition—Rowlandson's grotesques, Philipon's La Caricature—from which the sequential comic strip would emerge within a generation.