Two friends conversing about a recent operation for strabismus

Published under the heading Actualités in the French satirical press, this lithograph by Honoré Daumier shows two bourgeois men mid-conversation; the taller figure's eyes bulge in exaggerated divergent squint — the very condition, strabismus, they are discussing. The caption has him declare, with comic irony, that surgery has changed him completely. Daumier worked in the tradition of Rowlandson and Gillray but hardened it into the crisp tonal contrasts lithography allowed, producing hundreds of such sheets for Le Charivari. His working-class and professional types carry the era's class condescension — the over-dressed, bug-eyed bourgeois is a stock figure of ridicule. These numbered, disposable print series, distributed cheaply to urban readers, are a direct structural ancestor of the sequential comic page.