Comme c'est appétissant pour ceux qui commencent

Honoré Daumier's hand-colored lithograph places four diners around a restaurant table cluttered with bottles, plates, and glassware. Three men — one slumped forward, another leaning in with an expression caught between disgust and resignation, a third observing coolly — flank a single woman in a brown dress who watches the scene with composed detachment. The French caption translates roughly as How appetizing for those just beginning: the joke lands on the misery of shared dining, the social awkwardness of the table d'hôte. Daumier's work employs physiognomic shorthand for vulgarity in the depiction of the bourgeois types at the table. The work sits squarely in the lineage running from Rowlandson's London tavern scenes through Daumier himself to the sequential comic panels of Le Charivari, the direct ancestor of the modern comic strip.