A Lady Boarding the Tram

This hand-colored lithograph depicts a fashionably dressed woman in an enormous pink ball gown attempting to board a crowded streetcar numbered 91, while bemused conductors and passengers peer from the windows. The print mocks both female vanity and the practical absurdity of wartime fashion during World War I. The exaggerated silhouette—rendered in bold oranges, greens, and magentas—recalls the caricature tradition descending from Rowlandson and Daumier through nineteenth-century popular prints. The humorous social commentary on gender, class, and urban life connects directly to the satirical picture-sheets and comic imagery that would shape early twentieth-century sequential art. French and Flemish lithographic satire flourished as accessible humor for working and middle-class audiences.