A Chemist Demonstrates Arsenic Detection Before a Crowd

A seated figure in spectacles—rendered with the slightly bulbous features typical of Daumier's bourgeois caricature—faces a standing expert who gestures toward laboratory glassware while a packed audience of indistinct, near-identical faces watches from behind. The French caption declares that the friendship of a great chemist is no gift from the gods; the speaker boasts he could now poison his intimate friend Coquardeau and find arsenic in the glass of his spectacles. The reference is almost certainly to the era's celebrated arsenic-detection trials, when forensic chemistry became a public spectacle.

Printed as a color lithograph for Daumier's Actualités series, this sheet belongs to the great Franco-British caricature tradition—Gillray's grotesques, Rowlandson's crowd scenes—that fed directly into the sequential picture-strips of Töpffer and the Bilderbogen, the true ancestors of the modern comic book.