Permanent Collection: Daumier's The Uprising @ The Phillips Collection
“Blind by immediate perils of his positions, haunted by his dream of the future, he is the anonymous standard bearer of innumerable battles without name. He is pure flame. Such fire will liberate and cleanse the world,” Duncan Phillips on Honoré Daumier’s The Uprising in 1940.
While some art collectors purchase works that will some day turn a profit, others looks for pieces that are personally significant in some capacity. Duncan Phillips, the founder of the Phillips Collection, admired many painters, but one of his favorites was Honoré Daumier, a nineteenth century French artist. Daumier is best known for his political cartoons depicting poor French society and caricatures of life under King Louis-Philippe. These drawings led to Daumier’s imprisonment for six months under charges of sedition in 1832.
Phillips thought that Daumier was on the same level as Michelangelo, since the two were able to unearth and represent meaning in everyday activities and express it in a universal way. The Phillips Collection owns quite a few works by the artist — 48 lithographs, one watercolor, one drawing, one painting formerly attributed to him, and seven oil paintings, including The Uprising .
The painting is a snapshot of the revolutionary fervor that encompassed the 1848 revolution and the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy. The painting’s main figure both incites the mob and illustrates the frustrations felt by the lower classes — his eyes are open, but he does not see. Daumier added a vertical wall on the right side of the painting and dark shadows on the left to compress the mob scene and heighten feeling.
Critics believe that Daumier left the painting simply sketched out and that someone else retouched it, but Phillips maintained that the work celebrated Daumier’s abilities. He considered The Uprising his favorite of Daumier’s paintings, and also referred to it as “the greatest picture in the Collection.”
During World War II, Phillips found the painting particularly resonant, thinking that the emotions it elicited were so vital that he wanted to have copies of it dropped from the skies over Europe.
See here for an important painting from the Phillips Collection that we profiled back in January.
The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st St., NW. Visit their web site for hours and admission prices.
Honoré Daumier (1808–79)
The Uprising, 1848 or later
Oil on canvas
34 ½ x 44 ½ inches
Acquired 1925
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.