C'est un petit diable un vrai Dauphin...

From Honoré Daumier's Les Baigneurs series, this hand-colored lithograph — the dominant satirical medium of July Monarchy France — depicts summer bathers at a river's edge. In the foreground, a grotesquely exaggerated child thrashes in the shallows while a stout adult struggles to restrain him; the caption reads "C'est un petit diable un vrai Dauphin, il adore l'eau! on ne le retiendrait pas… il y resterait." The physical comedy targets bourgeois leisure, a favorite Daumier subject. The caricatural distortion of faces and bodies — bulging eyes, rubbery limbs — belongs to the physiognomic tradition running from Hogarth and Rowlandson through Gillray, here filtered through the cheap lithographic press that made mass satirical imagery possible and directly shaped the sequential comic strip that followed.