Je suis un honnête homme! — Cham, 1866

A pen-and-ink beach cartoon by Cham (Amédée de Noé), likely reproduced as a wood engraving for a French illustrated periodical. Two figures face each other on a shoreline: a stout, turbaned bathing attendant — drawn with the broad, exaggerated features typical of working-class caricature in Second Empire France — confronts a comically skeletal bourgeois woman. The caption delivers the joke: he quoted her a price when she was dressed; now undressed, she is half the work. The class humor cuts both ways, mocking attendant avarice and fashionable female vanity simultaneously. Cham worked squarely in the tradition running from Daumier's *Charivari* lithographs through the German *Bilderbogen* picture-sheets — sequential, captioned, disposable printed humor whose rhythm of image and speech balloon is the direct ancestor of the comic strip.