Crie donc, mâtin! (Cry Out, You Brute!)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his signature medium, drawn on stone and pulled in mass editions for the Parisian satirical press — shows a physician in nightcap presenting a howling newborn to its shrieking, open-mouthed mother propped in bed, a candle and wicker bassinet at her side. The comedy is domestic and class-conscious: the doctor's smug theatricality mirrors the mother's exaggerated hysteria, both rendered with Daumier's characteristic distortion of jaw and eye that owes everything to Lavater's physiognomy and Rowlandson's grotesques. The image belongs to Daumier's long campaign of bourgeois mockery — doctors, lawyers, judges — published in *Le Charivari*. That journal's format of recurring character types printed in sequence is a direct ancestor of the comic strip panel.