Quand les enfants ont été bien sages...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — printed from a hand-drawn greasy-crayon stone, the dominant cheap-print medium of July Monarchy Paris — shows a barrel-chested father, stripped to bathing drawers, hoisting a small child while a second child reaches up from the plank dock behind him. The caption reads, in period bourgeois irony, that well-behaved children earn a swim with papa whether papa finds it pleasurable or not. The figures carry Daumier's characteristic physical exaggeration: swollen torso, rubbery limbs, faces tipped toward grotesque without crossing into cruelty. The print belongs to his *Les Baigneurs* series — domestic comedies aimed at the Parisian middle class — placing it squarely in the satirical print tradition running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson's social grotesques to the numbered French *série* sheets that would directly seed the sequential comic strip by the 1890s.