From the exhibition
Oui! oui! c'est entendu, je comprends!...
Honoré Daumier · 1839

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his chosen weapon throughout a career that earned him imprisonment under Louis-Philippe — shows two men leaning across a café table, wine glasses raised mid-negotiation, their faces pressed close in conspiratorial agreement. Daumier exaggerates jaw, nose, and brow in the physiognomic shorthand of his era: the pseudoscience of Lavater translated into comic grotesque, class legible in every crease. The French caption reads as mutual self-congratulation, two bourgeois congratulating themselves on understanding each other perfectly. Published in the *Croquis d'expressions* series, the print sits squarely in the lineage running from Hogarth's moralizing plates through Gillray's political venom to Daumier himself — the tradition of sequential, reproducible satirical images whose page-grid logic directly fathers the newspaper comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/