Liberty Leading the People
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|
| La Liberté guidant le peuple |
| Eugène Delacroix, 1830 |
| oil on canvas |
| 260 × 325 cm |
| Louvre, Paris |
| 64 worlds greatest paintings |
Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution, and specifically the events of the 28 July 1830 in the centre of Paris. 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 bayonetted musket with the other.
Delacroix painted his work in the autumn of 1830. In a letter to his brother dated 12 October, he wrote: "My bad mood is vanishing thanks to hard work. I’ve embarked on a modern subject – a barricade. And if I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her." The painting was first exhibited at the official Salon of May 1831.
Delacroix depicted Liberty as 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, 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.
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