Bains de Femmes (Women's Baths)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph depicts a semi-public women's bathing enclosure: figures wade chest-deep in murky water while one woman holds an infant aloft, another submerges to her chin, and a clothed attendant observes from a raised platform above. The hand-coloring—applied over Daumier's characteristic crayon-drawn lithographic line—heightens the scene's comedic bathos. The caption text below, in French, offers sardonic commentary on bourgeois women's relationship to hygiene and fashionable 'taking the waters.' Daumier published hundreds of such plates in Le Charivari, working squarely within the print-satire lineage running from Hogarth through Rowlandson and Gillray: sequential, class-conscious, text-captioned single images that directly prefigure the comic strip's grammar. His working-class and bourgeois types carry the exaggerated physiognomy standard to 1840s caricature—broad comic distortion rather than the ethnic targeting found elsewhere in his oeuvre—skewering middle-class pretension with affectionate contempt.