Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple)

Eugène Delacroix

Oil on canvas

Musée du Louvre

Painted in the autumn of 1830, Liberty Leading the People is Eugène Delacroix's monumental commemoration of the July Revolution that toppled King Charles X of France. The central figure — a bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian cap personifying Liberty — strides forward over a barricade strewn with fallen bodies, holding the French tricolour aloft in one hand and a bayoneted musket in the other, leading a cross-section of French society that ranges from urban workers to bourgeois intellectuals. Delacroix, the acknowledged leader of the French Romantic school, fused allegorical grandeur with raw contemporary realism, employing his characteristic expressive brushwork and bold colour to create a pyramidal composition of striking dynamism. First exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1831, the painting became one of the most iconic images in Western art and an enduring universal symbol of liberty and popular revolt.