Toujours jolie! (Always Pretty!)

A lithograph from Daumier's Croquis d'expressions series published in Le Charivari, this hand-colored print sets an elderly woman — powdered, purple-bonneted, preening — against a lean young dandy who leans in with a smirk that reads as mockery rather than flattery. The class and age comedy is the point: Daumier's exaggerated jaws, bulbous noses, and rheumy eyes belong to the physiognomic caricature tradition his era used freely to type-cast social figures. Daumier drew directly onto lithographic stone, giving his line an urgency that distinguishes his work from the etched crosshatching of Gillray or Rowlandson before him. These cheap, widely circulated comic sheets — French, German, British alike — trained readers to parse sequential visual irony, the foundational skill the comic strip would later inherit and systematize.