Elle tenait ferme! (She Held Firm!)

From Daumier's *Scènes Grotesques* series (No. 4), this lithograph shows a female tooth-puller wrenching open a seated man's jaw with her bare hands, teeth scattered across the floor beside broken instruments. The figures are rendered in Daumier's characteristic exaggerated style — rubbery flesh, cavernous mouths, limbs straining with comic physicality — using the lithographic crayon's tonal range to model grotesque volume. The caption, *Elle tenait ferme!* ('She held firm!'), skewers unlicensed street dentistry, a target of middle-class anxiety about working-class medical practice. Published in *Le Charivari*, this work sits squarely in the tradition running from Rowlandson's medical satires through Daumier to the sequential panel humor that would directly seed the European comic strip — proof that the gag panel, not fine art, was comics' true ancestor.