Viens donc...,mon ami, je ne trouve pas ce tableau joli

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, drawn directly on stone for mass reproduction — depicts a crowd of Salon visitors studying a large academic painting while a bourgeois man in a top hat consults his livret catalog. The painting-within-the-painting shows a chubby, alarmed child, rendered with Daumier's characteristic loose crayon line. The caption has a pharmacist explaining to a companion that the picture likely illustrates some new medicine. The target is the pretension of the official Paris Salon of 1859 and the middle-class visitor who navigates high art with commercial logic. Daumier's work for *Le Charivari* represents the direct line from Hogarth's crowded moral scenes and Gillray's savagery through to the sequential satirical strips that would become the modern comic strip.