Eugene Delacroix Liberty Leading the People 1830
Eugene Delacroix Freedom Leading the People 1830

Liberty Leading the People is one of Eugéne Delacroix's most well known Romantic paintings and is often associated with the French Revolution of 1789, fifty-fifty though it was painted following the 1830 uprising known as the Trois Glorieuses ("Three Glorious Days").

However, it is an enduring image of what we imagine a revolution to feel like: violent, ecstatic, and murderous.

Delacroix wrote to his nephew Charles Verninac: "Three days amidst gunfire and bullets, as there was fighting all around. A unproblematic stroller like myself ran the aforementioned take a chance of stopping a bullet as the impromptu heroes who advanced on the enemy with pieces of iron fixed to broom handles."

Past the time Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People in the autumn of 1830 he was already an best-selling leader of the Romantic schoolhouse in French painting.

He took inspiration from Rubens and other  painters from the Venetian Renaissance, with an accent on colour and move rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. His cardinal themes were characterised by dramatic and romantic content, which led him to travel to North Africa in search of the exotic. A friend and supporter of Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was too inspired past Byron, with whom he shared a stiff identification with the "forces of the sublime" of nature in tearing action.

The painting was showtime exhibited at the official Salon of May 1831. In a letter of the alphabet to his brother, he wrote: "My bad mood is vanishing thank you to difficult 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".

In the painting, the allegory of Liberty is personified by a young woman of the people wearing the Phrygian cap (freedom cap) of the before Revolution, her curls escaping onto her neck.

With her apparel falling downward to expose her breasts, Liberty holds up the tricolour, the flag of liberty (and now the French national flag) in a powerful arm. In her other mitt is a rifle with a fixed bayonet. She stands noble and resolute, her body illuminated on the right, cutting a distinct effigy amongst the men equally she turns her head to spur them on to final victory. The mound of corpses acts every bit a kind of pedestal from which she strides barefoot out of the picture frame and into the space of the viewer.

Two Parisian urchins have joined the fight: the ane on the left wide-eyed nether his light infantry cap; the more famous figure to the right of Liberty is Gavroche, a symbol of youthful revolt against injustice and cede for a noble cause. He sports the black velvet beret worn by students as a symbol of rebellion, and advances right foot forward, brandishing cavalry pistols with i arm raised, a state of war cry on his lips.

The fighter who carries an infantry sabre is recognisably a factory worker with his apron and crewman trousers.

The kneeling figure with the top hat of a conservative or fashionable urbanite (a poet or an artist, perhaps fifty-fifty Delacroix himself?) who wears loose-fitting trousers and an artisan's red flannel belt, clutches a double-barrelled hunting gun every bit if he has never touched a firearm before.

The wounded man raising himself up at the sight of Liberty with his knotted scarf, peasant's smock and red flannel chugalug suggest the temporary workers of Paris. The bluish jacket, red belt, and white shirt repeat the colours of the flag.

What these figures, who represent the diverse Parisian social classes, have in common is the fierceness and determination in their eyes.

The towers of Notre Matriarch which can be seen in the distance represent liberty and Romanticism—equally they did for writer Victor Hugo—and situate the activeness in Paris.

Delacroix'southward apply of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color shaped the work of the Post Impressionists. The composition is given unity by his skilful utilise of colour; the blue, white, and red elements have counterpoints; the white of the parallel straps across the fighters' shoulders echoes that of the gaiters and of the shirt on the corpse to the left, while the grey tonality enhances the ruby-red of the flag.

This work was the inspiration for New York's Statue of Freedom, which was given to the United States by the French in 1886.

This is an excerpt from my online art appreciation program, Introduction to Modern European Fine art, http://world wide web.modernartapprecistion.com