concept:era modern
Liberty Leading the People
Oil on canvas (1830) by Eugène Delacroix, depicting an allegorical female figure of Liberty leading revolutionary citizens over barricades. Painted in response to the French July Revolution of 1830. Held at the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Scholarly Significance
Anchor the French Romanticism cluster with Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), one of the most iconic political paintings in Western art.
Notes
- ·Painted by Delacroix in late 1830, in response to the July Revolution (27–29 July 1830) that overthrew Charles X.
- ·First exhibited at the Salon of 1831, where it was acquired by the French state.
- ·The central figure is an allegorical personification of Liberty (Marianne), bare-breasted, wearing a Phrygian cap, brandishing the French tricolour.
- ·The figures flanking her represent different social classes: a top-hatted bourgeois (possibly a self-portrait of Delacroix), a working-class man with a sabre, and a boy with pistols.
- ·The identity of the real model for Liberty is contested (see claim:liberty-allegory-real-figure-claim).
- ·The painting entered the Louvre collection and became one of the defining images of French national identity.
- ·Dimensions: 260 × 325 cm.