Un Père Heureux (A Happy Father)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his Les Beaux Jours de la Vie series shows a bespectacled bourgeois father peering myopically over a wicker cradle at his recently vaccinated infant, the mother hovering behind. The caption reads: Voilà donc mon enfant vacciné… je suis certain maintenant qu'il conservera désormais toute sa beauté! — a sardonic jab at parental vanity and the dawning public acceptance of Jennerian vaccination. The exaggerated facial distortion — bulging eyes, knotted brow — deploys the physiognomic caricature conventions Daumier inherited from Gillray and Rowlandson and passed forward toward the comic strip. His lithographic line, printed in the Aubert & Cie workshops on the Boulevard Montmartre, established sequential satirical cartooning as a legitimate popular art form, directly prefiguring the panel-by-panel visual storytelling of the modern comic book.