Eugène Delacroix is one of my very favorite artists. The man that devoted his life and all his love to art, captured one of the most recognized images of France.
His most recognized painting is La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, painted in 1830 for the Salon of 1831 and is now proudly on display in the Musée du Louvre. But let’s rewind quite a bit and see what this painting is all about.
The timeline of France is marked by more than one Revolution. Most know of the big one that resulted in the beheading of Marie Antoinette & Louis XVI which began in 1789. Four decades later the people would rise up again against the brother of Louis XVI. Charles X had taken the throne after the death of his brother Louis XVIII on September 16, 1824. Things would get worse for Charles in 1830 when on March 18 he dissolved the Parliament and as the press spoke up against him he censored them on July 25.
On Monday, July 26 more than 50 newspapers were forced to stop the presses. The next morning the owners gathered and vowed to fight back. As the police arrived at the offices of the newspapers to take their presses and newspapers they found the workers waiting and screaming. By the afternoon one by one the editors, owners, journalists, and printers began to march into the center of Paris. The Place Vendome, Place de la Bastille and the Place du Carrousel saw large crowds of outraged citizens whom the police were no match for.
On July 28 in front of the Hotel de Ville, the Garde Royal were quickly outnumbered. The angry crowd gathered every cobblestone and projectile to build barricades and also tossed them at the police force. It was at this moment that a 32-year-old Eugene Delacroix was just down the way at his studio at 15 Quai Voltaire and was moved to capture this penultimate moment of the Trois Glorieuses Jours.
Delacroix’s good friend Théodore Gericault just three years earlier painted the monument Raft of the Medusa. The current event painting won plenty of fans and skeptics. History paintings in the lexicon of art were deemed the pinnacle of all art styles but rarely were painted so close to the moment of the event. Delacroix said “if I can’t fight for my country, I will paint for it”, and he did just that.
For three months he sketched and painted from September 20 to mid-December 1830. An astonishingly quick period to create such a large piece and brought the entire moment to life. Displayed in the Salon of 1831, under the title Scenes de Barricades, it was met with a wide mix of criticism. Many thought the allegorical woman was dirty, displaying her hairy armpit and filthy feet while the nude man and his visible pubic hair were right at eye level.
The entire scene was one of the lower and upper classes as well as men of all ages united. This was exactly why the three-day Revolution is marked as such a defining moment in French history as told in art and also remembered by the July Column in the Place de la Bastille. It was the mix of all classes that stood up against the monarchy. While the first Revolution began with the poor vs the monarchy, the July Revolution saw all classes in arms together.
Delacroix perfectly captures that in his grand tableau. To the left of the center, we see what appears to be a wealthy man in his top hat. Many incorrectly identify it as a self-portrait of the artist but it’s most likely Delacroix’s close friend Frederic Villot, artist and curator of the dept of paintings at the Musée du Louvre. Next to him is a gentleman holding up an Infantry saber in his white shirt and the apron of a printer with a gun tucked into his waist. Behind these two men is a group of angry men that have one goal in mind, to follow Liberty. You can spot one wearing a tricorn hat and beret, a little hint that it was all walks of life and allegiances that stepped up.
In the center, it is impossible to not be drawn to the lovely allegory of Liberty which is also known now as the symbol of the Republic, Marianne. In her yellow tinted cream dress, she exposes her breast which symbolizes motherhood and the birth of the nation. Inspired by the Greek statuary and the goddess Victoire, the beautiful draping of her dress is reminiscent of my other favorite in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. However, Delacroix never would have seen this beauty. Discovered in 1863, the same year of Delacroix’s death, only her surviving torso was on display from 1865 to 1871.
Delacroix was the master of colors and uses them perfectly in this painting but with very few hues. Bleu, Blanc et Rouge stands out in this painting, exactly as they should. Using color and light he directs your eye to what he wants you to see first. The French flag as we know it today was first unveiled in 1794 and was prominent during the Revolution. In 1814 it was changed to the solid white flag of the Bourbon dynasty which lasted until three days in July of 1830.
The image today is the one that is used to symbolize France, but he was foreshadowing in this snapshot of the barricades that the Tricolor would return to France. The flag of Paris at the time was blue and red, add the white in the center of the Bourbons and voila, the Drapeau of France was born.
Delacroix also uses it on the man below who is crawling up the barricade and looking up at Liberty. The print worker in his blue shirt with a bit of white peeking out and his red sash also evoke the flag and that of the people devoting themselves to liberty.
When the painting was first exhibited her red Phrygian cap was a much brighter red and he was asked to mute the color to a deeper shade in 1855. The cap itself dates back to Roman times when it was placed on the freed slaves and thus an image of freedom. Love a girl that accessories in red! In her left hand, she holds a rifle that brings the classic Greek & Roman image to the contemporary moment.
While Liberty holds up the French Tricolor, she turns her perfectly sculpted face of a Roman coin back to the crowd that has gathered to follow her. At her side is a young boy with two pistols in the air, and an ammo bag around his torso he took off a guard and was ready to take up the fight today and into the future.
The classic pyramid structure, much like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, is a mix of hope and despair. At the top of the pyramid, you have the flag and as your eye travels down at the base there is death. On the right are the Swiss guards outnumbered by the citizens and to the left, plucked out of Gericault’s masterpiece is the body of a man that was pulled from his home into the street by the police and killed as a message to others. Delacroix painted one blue sock onto the man as a nod to his friend who had a difficult time painting feet.
In the top right, don’t miss the towers of Notre Dame de Paris. The symbol of France and the conservative monarchy was topped with a tiny French Tricolor you can see against the smoke as the rise of the French Republic was on its way.
At the Salon of 1831, the painting was purchased by the State for 3000 francs but it was only briefly displayed in the Musée du Luxembourg. Adolphe Thiers was worried it would inspire another uprising and had it removed and returned to Delacroix in 1832. The painting hid away in the Val d’Oise with his aunt Felicité Riesener until 1848 when it returned to the Luxembourg but hidden away until the 1855 Universal Exhibition when he also had to darken her cap. Special permission had to be obtained for the exhibition and after the painting went back into storage. In 1863 when it was finally returned to the public it was too late for the master to see it hung, the father of the Romantic movement was gone. In 1874 it finally moved to the Salle Mollier of the Louvre where you can still see it today.
One day another artist, Frederic Bartholdi visited the Louvre and saw our lovely Delacroix Liberty which inspired his design of his very own. Today Delacroix’s well-known painting has been copied onto clothes, reimagined in billboards, inspired other artists to adapt it as their own, projected onto the side of a plane and even my beloved Swatch watch. She is brought out every 14 juillet and any other moment of immense French pride and I always smile when I see her.
Once a week on an early morning in the Louvre before the masses descend into the Denon wing to find Mona I find a few quiet moments to sit with her and worship the master of the Romantic period, and also my birthday buddy.
