Măturător (The Sweeper)

Constantin Jiquidi's pen sketch depicts a ragged street sweeper, rendered with expressive line work characteristic of late 19th-century European caricature. The figure's exaggerated features and hunched posture reflect the class caricature tradition descending from Hogarth and Gillray through Daumier and Nast—satirizing poverty and manual labor through physiognomic distortion. This drawing participates in a long print culture that used grotesque exaggeration to comment on social hierarchies, rendering working-class subjects as objects of ridicule rather than sympathy. Such imagery, while documenting contemporary attitudes toward labor and class, embeds period prejudices that modern viewers should recognize critically. The sketch's rough, economical line anticipates the visual vocabulary of early comic illustration and newspaper cartooning.