Liberty Leading the People

A bare-breasted allegorical figure of Liberty, the tricolor in one hand and a musket in the other, strides forward over the bodies of the fallen, leading a ragged band of bourgeois, workers, and a pistol-waving boy across a barricade in the smoke of the 1830 July Revolution. Delacroix fuses gritty contemporary reality with soaring allegory, the living and the dead surging toward us. Now in the Louvre, Liberty Leading the People is among the most famous political images ever painted - revolution itself given a face, fierce, mournful, and triumphant at once.