The Fugitives

The Fugitives belongs to Daumier's sustained engagement with subjects of displacement, mass movement, and human endurance under extreme circumstances. His fugitive subjects — figures fleeing through landscape — appear across multiple paintings and drawings and may reference specific historical events such as political persecution after the 1848 coup d'état, or may be more generically conceived as images of human flight and suffering. The Minneapolis Institute of Art holds this canvas, painted around 1868. Daumier experienced political persecution himself: his caricatures of Louis-Philippe had led to imprisonment in 1832, and his awareness of political violence and its human costs was personal as well as observed. The fugitive subject allows him to work in a more dramatic register than his social-comedy pieces, bringing Romantic energy to Realist subject matter — the moving mass of figures, the implied landscape, the sense of desperate forward motion.

The horizontal composition shows a mass of figures moving across the picture plane. Daumier's broadly gestural handling creates forms more abstract than specific, appropriate for a subject about collective rather than individual experience.