Un train de plaisir

From Daumier's series Les Trains de Plaisir, this lithograph packs a crowded railway car with bourgeois Parisians rendered in his signature exaggerated style: bulbous noses, slack jaws, bodies pressed together in comic indignity. The single lamp overhead barely illuminates the crush of passengers—a cross-section of middle-class French society caught in the unglamorous reality of cheap excursion travel. Daumier worked within a caricature tradition running from Hogarth's moral tableaux and Gillray's grotesques through Rowlandson's crowd scenes; his lithographs for Le Charivari brought that tradition into mass-circulation print. The sequential, panel-based logic of such series—characters in shared situations, repeated across numbered plates—fed directly into the narrative grammar that would become the comic strip.