Voyez-vous, Bourgeois, vous êtes...dans la force

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — hand-colored, printed from a stone rather than etched into copper — depicts a bathhouse scene: a barrel-chested vendor, glass of wine raised, addresses a half-draped bourgeois client whose soft, doughy body is rendered with merciless fidelity. A third figure crouches scrubbing in the background. The French caption flatters the customer about his vigor while the image undercuts every word. Daumier worked in the direct line from Rowlandson and Gillray, deploying physiognomic exaggeration to pin social types — here the self-satisfied middle-class male, the commercial flatterer — to a page. This serial satirical print tradition, distributed cheaply and widely, established the sequential visual language and recurring character types that would migrate directly into the comic strip within the following half-century.