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Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix · Romanticism & Landscape
- Artist
- Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
- Date
- 1830
- Dimensions
- 260 x 325 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
Liberty Leading the People commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, when the people of Paris rose up and overthrew King Charles X. A bare-breasted woman personifying Liberty strides over a barricade, holding the French tricolour flag high.
A closer look
Liberty is both an allegory and a woman of the people, barefoot and wearing a Phrygian cap, the symbol of freedom. Around her surge Parisians of every class: a worker with a sabre, a bourgeois in a top hat holding a rifle, a boy brandishing two pistols. The dead lie in the foreground among the rubble, and the towers of Notre-Dame rise through the smoke in the distance. Delacroix wrote that if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her.
History of the painting
The French government of King Louis-Philippe bought the painting in 1831 for 3,000 francs, intending it as an image of the revolution that had brought him to power, but it soon seemed too dangerous and was hidden away; Delacroix eventually got it back. It was shown again briefly after the revolution of 1848 and entered the Louvre in 1874. In 2013 a visitor scrawled on it with a marker at the Louvre-Lens, and the mark was removed without lasting harm; a major restoration in 2023–24 removed yellowed varnish and brought back the bright blue, white and red of the flag.
