Elle tenait ferme! (She Held Firm!)

From Daumier's Scènes Grotesques series (No. 4), this lithograph shows a female tooth-puller wrenching open a seated man's jaw with her bare hands, teeth scattered across the floor beside broken instruments. The figures are rendered in Daumier's characteristic exaggerated style — rubbery flesh, cavernous mouths, limbs straining with comic physicality — using the lithographic crayon's tonal range to model grotesque volume. The caption, Elle tenait ferme! ('She held firm!'), skewers unlicensed street dentistry, a target of middle-class anxiety about working-class medical practice. Published in Le Charivari, this work sits squarely in the tradition running from Rowlandson's medical satires through Daumier to the sequential panel humor that would directly seed the European comic strip — proof that the gag panel, not fine art, was comics' true ancestor.