Liberty Leading the People

History

Delacroix painted it in the autumn of 1830 to mark the July Revolution, three days of street fighting in Paris that brought down King Charles X. Liberty, a woman of the people, carries the tricolour over a barricade and the dead, with a man in a top hat and a boy with two pistols beside her. The government bought it in 1831, then took it down as too inflammatory, and it spent years out of view. It entered the Louvre in 1874. A restoration finished in 2024 took off layers of yellowed varnish and brought back its blue, white and red.