"V'la mon p'tit... s'il n'a pas assez de moyens pour être avec moi... dans l'épicerie... j'en ferai aussi un artiste!"

A lithograph from Daumier's Tout ce qu'on voudra series, printed by Aubert et Cie, Paris. A paint-palette-holding artist in a loose smock faces a prosperous bourgeois gentleman who pushes his small son forward, suggesting the boy might become a painter if he lacks the means to inherit the family grocery business — art as fallback, not calling. The bourgeois father is rendered with the round, self-satisfied physiognomy Daumier habitually assigned to the French middle class: comfortable, slightly ridiculous, earnest in his philistinism. The draftsmanship is confident crayon lithography, Daumier's native medium. This gentle class comedy sits squarely in the tradition running from Hogarth's moral narratives through Gillray's political savagery to the sequential French illustrated press — the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel social observation.