Excusez, regard' donc la grosse Fifine...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his medium of choice for mass-circulation satire — shows two bathers submerged to the shoulders in a public river bath, its rough wooden barrier sign reading Bains des Dames à 4 sous. The figures, rendered with Daumier's characteristic exaggerated physiognomy, peer and gesture at an unseen third woman; the caption mocks working-class female bodies with the blunt cruelty routine in bourgeois French comic press of the July Monarchy. Published in the Les Baigneurs series, it sits squarely in the tradition running from Rowlandson's bawdy aquatints through Daumier's own La Caricature and Le Charivari — periodical print satire that taught readers to read sequential panels, type-characters, and visual punchlines, the direct institutional ancestor of the comic strip.