Car Breakdown — Pagliano

A spirited early twentieth-century chromolithograph capturing a fashionable family stranded by a roadside motoring mishap, faithful dog at their side.

Drawn by Riccardo Pagliano. Published in La Vie Parisienne, Paris, c. 1920.

La Vie Parisienne was a celebrated French weekly that documented modern manners, fashion, and the foibles of bourgeois leisure. Pagliano's motoring scenes belong to a vogue for automobile satire in the early decades of the century, when private cars were still glamorous, unreliable, and ripe for comic illustration.

Chromolithograph. Sheet size approximately 27.5 × 19.3 cm. Very Good.