The Emigrants (Daumier)

The Emigrants is an oil-on-wood painting by the French realist painter Honoré Daumier.

[1] After the workers' revolution of June 1848, the government of Louis Philippe reacted with strong repression, issuing death sentences, thousands of imprisonments and deportations to Algeria.

[2] The painting depicts a group of political fugitives crossing a mountainous landscape, on feet and on horseback.

A landscape of dunes is traversed by a column of curved, schematically, hardly recognizable, drawn figures.

Daumier manages to convey desperation and anguish through this simple diagonal composition of yellow and brown tones.