La Marchande d'Eventails (The Fan Seller)

Wilhelm Wörnle's etching depicts a street scene of everyday commerce in a European city. A woman vendor displays her wares—fans—to passersby in an urban marketplace, surrounded by figures in period dress. The composition uses cross-hatching and fine line work characteristic of 19th-century printmaking. While this work predates the newspaper comic strip era by decades, it shares visual conventions that would later define comics: sequential narrative suggestion, multiple figures in interaction, and detailed architectural setting that grounds human activity. Such prints established the visual vocabulary for depicting daily life and social interchange that newspaper cartoonists would adapt and formalize into the panel-based sequential art form emerging in the 1890s.