Mme. Greluche: Oh Gustave, qu'elle est bonne!...

A hand-colored lithograph by Honoré Daumier from his Les Baigneurs series, published in the French satirical press. Three bourgeois bathers stand chest-deep in shallow water: a stout woman shielding herself with a parasol, a child submerged to the chin, and a gaunt older figure whose exaggerated hooked nose and sunken cheeks carry the anti-Semitic physiognomic caricature routine in French popular print of the period — deployed here as class comedy targeting Parisian middle-class pretension at fashionable bathing resorts. Daumier worked in the tradition running from Rowlandson and Gillray through Philipon's La Caricature, using lithography's crayon-soft line to mass-produce social satire. This sequential series format — recurring named characters in recurring situations — is a direct ancestor of the comic strip.