Aureriez-vous de l'huile de Cotterêts!...

A lithograph from Daumier's Types Parisiens series — the bourgeois Parisian street life he documented across hundreds of prints for Le Charivari. A heavyset shopkeeper leans across his counter toward a smaller figure, likely a young errand-boy or servant; the exaggerated jowls and bulk of the merchant follow the period convention of using physical grotesquerie to mark class and social type. The caption references huile de Cotterêts — charcoal-district lamp oil — fixing these figures in the working commercial quarters of Paris. Daumier's lithographic line descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's satirical prints and feeds forward into Töpffer's sequential picture stories and eventually the comic strip. His serial panel work for the press is among the clearest bridges between 18th-century print caricature and the modern comic page.