A painting a day · No. 20 of 38
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
1830 · Oil on canvas · Musée du Louvre, Paris
The story
Paris, July 1830: three days of street fighting drive out King Charles X. Liberty — a woman, part goddess and part street fighter — leads the crowd over the barricade with the French flag.
Look closer
- The boy with two pistols is said to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
- The man in the top hat is often said to be Delacroix himself. Nobody is sure.
- The towers of Notre-Dame appear through the smoke on the right.
Did you know
The Louvre cleaned it in 2023–24. The picture on this page is the new, brighter one: the flag's blue and red came back.
Why we can show it
Eugène Delacroix died in 1863. UK copyright lasts for the artist’s life plus 70 years, so even under today’s rules this painting would have been free for anyone to show since 1934. The photograph is a faithful copy of a flat work, which creates no new copyright. We do not store the picture: it comes from Wikimedia Commons each time it is needed. More on this.