La leçon à sec

Honoré Daumier's lithograph belongs to his Les Baigneurs series, a sustained comic attack on bourgeois Parisian leisure culture. The scene depicts a swimming lesson conducted entirely on dry land: a pupil in yellow trunks lies prone across a suspended rope, arms windmilling under instruction, while a second man sprawls collapsed on the floor and a third instructor throws up his hands in exasperation. The humor is physical and class-conscious — the aspiring middle-class bather exposed as ridiculous in his pretension to fashionable sport. Daumier, working for Le Charivari, perfected the lithographic crayon stroke that let him achieve painterly shadow at mass-market scale. This tradition of sequenced comic prints — from Hogarth's moral series through Rowlandson through Daumier — fed directly into the newspaper comic strip and, eventually, the comic book page.