Liberty Leading the People
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La Liberté guidant le peuple
Eugène Delacroix, 1830
oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm
Musée du Louvre
Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix, created on July 28, 1830. It was painted to commemorate the July Revolution. A woman personifying Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the tricolore flag of the French Revolution in one hand and brandishing a bayonet with the other.
In Delacroix's depiction Liberty is both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people, an approach that contemporary critics denounced as "ignoble". The mound of corpses acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides, barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolise liberty during the French Revolution.
The fighters are from a mixture of a classes, ranging from the bourgeoisie, represented by the young man in a top hat (possibly a self-portrait by Delacroix), to the lower classes, as exemplified by the boy holding pistols (believed by some to be the inspiration for the character Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables). What they have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes. Aside from the flag held by Liberty, a second, minute tricolore can be discerned in the distance flying from the towers of Notre Dame.
The French government bought the painting for 3,000 francs with the intention of displaying it in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg as a reminder to the "citizen-king" Louis-Philippe of the July Revolution, through which he had come to power. This plan did not come to fruition and the canvas was hung in the Palace museum for a few months before being taken down for its inflammatory political message. Delacroix was permitted to send the painting to his aunt Felicité for safekeeping. It was exhibited briefly in 1848 and then in the Salon of 1855.
The posture (though not the attire) of the figure in the painting suggests that of the Statue of Liberty, designed by French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi in the 1880s.
An engraved rendering of this painting, along with an engraving of Delacroix himself, was featured on the 100 franc note in the early 1990s.
Reference
- Prideaux, Tom, etc. (1972). The World of Delacroix. United States: Time Life.
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