PICHARD - Cheesecake art (1967)

Ink and watercolor for the cover of Le Rire #196 (Jan. 1968).

Georges Pichard (1920-2003) was a very big name in the French/Francophone comic art world from the 1960s through the 1980s. If you are interested in a brief English-language summary of his career, read the entry devoted to him in Lambiek's Comiclopedia (https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/pichard.htm).
Pichard was a talented draftsman, who worked as an art teacher first and secondly as a cartoonist. He produced comics for such magazines as Spirou and Pilote and daily strips for the French press but the real thread running through his career was his peerless talent to draw pretty women: from cheesecake art in 60s' humor magazines for men to the erotic renditions of female protagonists in the rambling tongue-in-cheek spoofs of 19th century serial novels (from the mid-1960s to the 1970s: "Blanche Epiphanie" scripted by Jacques Lob and "Paulette" scripted by Georges Wolinski) to the sado-masochistic art that typified the bulk of his output in the last 25 years of his career, starting with Marie-Gabrielle de Sainte-Eutrope (Glénat, 1977).
Pichard's ultra-porn books unfortunately went on to become trees concealing a forest of more original collaborative projects like his adaptation of Homer's Odyssey scripted by Jacques Lob (Ulysse, 1974-1975), his personal takes on Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (1981) and "Les Sorcières de Thessalie" (1985-1986) based on Apuleius' 2nd-century AD novel "The Golden Ass." From 1987 to his death he essentially produced hardcore pornography, including a bizarre, SM adaptation of Emile Zola's famous novel Germinal.
Long story short: twenty years after his passing, Georges Pichard's work has become a hard sell in the #MeToo era's comics studies... Still he was an outstanding draftsman and many of his drawings of female characters do not deserve to be consigned to any 21st-century pyre...
This has been a very long-winded foreword to feature one of my latest original art scores, this ink and watercolor piece drawn by Pichard to adorn the cover of the January 1968 issue of Le Rire, a justifiably forgotten 3rd-tier digest-sized monthly magazine for men that included sexy jokes, cheesecake art, ads for nudist magazines and sexual education manuals....
Forget the balloon and caption (which are both so lame as to be perfectly unfunny by today's standards) and just enjoy Georges Pichard's exquisite artwork.