Un Oculiste Breveté (A Licensed Eye Specialist)

A hand-coloured lithograph after Charles Philipon, printed by Honoré Daumier, this image shows a rotund, self-important eye doctor — the stock con-man figure Monsieur Macaire — looming over a seated patient whose eyes are bandaged with a green shade. The doctor's exaggerated belly, theatrical robes, and smug posture broadcast quackery; the French caption below records his florid sales pitch, urging the half-blind patient to spend still more money. The caricature's distorted bodies and moral shorthand place it squarely in the tradition running from Hogarth's industry-and-idleness prints through Gillray and Rowlandson to Daumier's own lithographic campaigns for La Caricature. That French press culture of the 1830s — cheap, reproducible, politicised — fed directly into the sequential picture-sheet and eventually the comic strip: the panel, the speech balloon, the exaggerated villain-face all begin here.