painting - Liberty Leading the People
Photograph by duwagison Flickr.
The painting has had an influence on classical music as well; George Antheil titled his Symphony No. It was exhibited briefly in 1848 and then in the Salon painting The Triumph of Death of 1855.
Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Charles X. Delacroix rejected the norms of Academicism in favor of Romanticism. He depicted Liberty, personified by Marianne, symbol of the nation, as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people, an approach that contemporary critics denounced as ignoble .
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. What they have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes.
Delacroix was permitted to send the painting to his aunt Félicité for safekeeping. The statue, which holds a torch in its hand, takes a stance similar to that of the woman in the painting. An engraved version of this painting, along with a depiction of Delacroix himself, was featured on the 100-franc note in the early 1990s. The painting is frequently reproduced or reinterpreted in popular culture, and has recently been featured on the front cover of Eric Hobsbawm s Age of Revolution, Fareed Zakaria s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, The Economist, and in the artwork for Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends by Coldplay.
6 After Delacroix, and stated that the work was inspired by his viewing of a copy of Liberty Leading the People. . 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 identity of the man in the top hat has been widely debated.
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. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolise liberty during the French Revolution of 1789. The fighters are from a mixture of social classes, ranging from the upper classes represented by the young man in a top hat, to the revolutionary middle class or (bourgeoisie), as exemplified by the boy holding pistols (who may have been the inspiration for the character Gavroche in Victor Hugo s Les Misérables).
This is perhaps Delacroix s best-known painting, having carved its own niche in popular culture. Delacroix painted his work in the autumn of 1830. 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.
In 1874, the painting entered the Louvre. It inspired the Statue of Liberty in New York City, which was given to the United States as a gift from the French only 50 years after Liberty Leading the People had been painted. but there is no firm consensus on this point. The French government bought the painting in 1831 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.
I’ve embarked on a modern subject—a barricade. The suggestion that it was a self-portrait by Delacroix has been discounted by modern art historians.
