Two gentlemen inspect the water from the new Artesian well in Grenelle, just outside Paris

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his Actualités series shows two bourgeois Parisians examining a glass of water drawn from the newly completed Grenelle artesian well. One tips a carafe directly into his open mouth while the other peers skeptically through spectacles at his glass. The caption reads: "Decidedly this warm water is very bad to drink" / "Yes, but there are many small insects in it!" — a public-health joke about the well's celebrated but impure output. Daumier renders both men with bulbous noses and exaggerated jowls, the stock grotesque physiognomy of middle-class pretension inherited from Rowlandson and Gillray. Published in Le Charivari, this lithographic pamphlet-press tradition — cheap, reproducible, sequentially numbered — feeds directly into the panel-by-panel visual storytelling that would become the modern comic strip.