Dire que vais être...exposé...

A lithograph from Daumier's *L'Exposition de 1859* series, published in *Le Charivari*. A bourgeois couple — the husband puffed with self-importance, the wife in fashionable dress — stands before a marble bust, their small daughter looking on. The husband appears to be the subject of the bust, preening before his own likeness; the French caption deflates his vanity with domestic irony. Daumier works in the tradition of Rowlandson and Gillray: the crayon lithograph's loose, expressive line gives the figures a rubbery grotesquerie that exaggerates class pretension without venturing into the ethnic caricature common elsewhere in 19th-century satirical press. These serialized single-image gags, printed cheap and distributed widely, are a direct ancestor of the sequential comic strip — recurring character types, implied dialogue, visual punchline.