Les Pratiques des Marchands de Paris

This French lithograph depicts a street merchant's deceptive sales pitch to a female customer, surrounded by hanging wares and market goods. The exaggerated facial features and body language of both figures exemplify the caricature tradition established by Gillray and Rowlandson, refined here through lithographic technique. The print belongs to a long lineage of urban satire targeting commercial fraud and class interaction—subjects central to French popular prints of the 1830s–40s. Such works mocked merchants' manipulation of working-class and bourgeois consumers alike, using distorted physiognomy to underscore moral failings. This satirical vocabulary—grotesque features marking dishonesty—would flow directly into early comic illustration and the sequential narratives of 19th-century periodicals, establishing visual conventions that persist in modern comics.