Allons lancez vous Père Goutot…

Honoré Daumier's hand-colored lithograph—the dominant satirical medium of July Monarchy France—shows a heavyset man in blue bathing drawers clinging to a ladder at the edge of a public bathing enclosure while a companion bobs in the murky water below, coaxing him in. Two pairs of legs dangle from a platform above, indifferent. The caption, roughly "Come on, launch yourself, Père Goutot—it's quite warm!" targets the bourgeois bather's cowardice, rendered through the grotesque physical exaggeration that was Daumier's signature: bulging torso, grimacing face, locked knees. His Les Baigneurs series appeared in Le Charivari, the periodical that trained readers to follow recurring characters across sequential images—precisely the narrative habit that fed directly into the comic strip tradition Töpffer was simultaneously codifying just across the French border.