“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 .