The Strong Man

The Strong Man belongs to Daumier's extensive documentation of popular entertainment in nineteenth-century France — the fairs, circuses, street performers, and traveling shows that brought spectacle to working-class and popular audiences across the country. A strongman act, with its display of physical power and theatrical audience address, offered Daumier the combination of performance and spectatorship that he explored across many subjects. The Phillips Collection holds this oil on canvas, dated around 1865, alongside other Daumier theater and entertainment subjects that together constitute an invaluable visual record of French popular culture in the Second Empire period. Daumier's treatment of popular entertainment subjects reflects his democratic sympathies and his long career documenting the entertainments available to people outside the bourgeois cultural institutions of the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. The strongman's physical display creates a counterpoint to the intellectual performances of the lawyers and artists Daumier more frequently depicted.

The strongman's figure — muscular, displayed, performing — is rendered with Daumier's broad gestural handling, the physical mass of the body conveyed through tonal volume rather than anatomical detail. The surrounding audience creates a framing context of absorbed or impressed spectators.