Les jolies femmes de Paris, No. 15

This lithograph depicts a domestic interior where a man reclines on a bed reading while a woman enters, creating a scene of casual intimacy rendered with sharp social observation. The print belongs to a serial mockery of Parisian female types—a tradition extending from Hogarth's moral narratives and Gillray's political caricatures through Daumier's caustic urban scenes. The medium of lithography enabled rapid, economical production of such satirical imagery for popular consumption. The dialogue below ridicules bourgeois courtship rituals and female behavior, reflecting mid-19th-century anxieties about gender roles and urban morality. This work exemplifies how serial caricature and topical satire, born from 18th-century print culture, evolved into the mass-distributed visual comedy that would inform modern sequential art.