The Emigrants
by DAUMIER, Honoré, Plaster
Daumier is best known as a caricaturist, but worked in other media as well, in which he appears as both a Romantic and a Realist. The theme of The Emigrants, which he treated in paintings and sculptures several times over the course of the years, first attracted him during the period of bourgeois reaction which, at the end of the year 1848, followed the February Revolution and caused the death and deportation of thousands of Republicans. Two bas-relief sketches, cast in plaster from the clay models, remain timeless symbols of suffering.