The French Revolution was painted while it was happening, by people who had something to win or lose. A king paid for pictures that were later read as arguments against his throne. The new Republic ordered martyrs and dropped them within months, and two canvases here were left unfinished when the men they celebrated fell.
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French Revolution paintings are the pictures made around the upheaval that began in 1789, when France pulled down its monarchy, executed its king and set out to build a republic. Some painters of those years sat in the new assemblies.
The subject asked them to take a side, in streets they walked every day. The state ordered pictures to honor its martyrs and to teach schoolchildren, and the Salon at the Louvre kept opening, so a canvas could answer an event within months.
Each picture here was either made at the time, by someone with a stake in the outcome, or shaped the way 1789 has been seen since. That is why the dates run across nearly fifty years, and why one painter keeps coming back.
12. Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)
A woman strides over a barricade in Liberty Leading the People, a musket in one hand and the tricolor flag raised in the other, while a boy with a pistol in each fist runs at her side. It is the picture most people see when they think of the French Revolution, and yet it shows a different revolution.
Eugène Delacroix painted it in 1830, a few months after the July uprising, three days of street fighting in Paris that overthrew King Charles X and put Louis Philippe on the throne. The barricades and the tricolor had been borrowed from 1789, four decades earlier. That borrowing is why the two revolutions now share one image.
The crowd around Liberty, though, comes from the streets of 1830. Delacroix put in a man in a bourgeois top hat holding a rifle, and a student of the École Polytechnique, France's top engineering school, in his bicorne. At her feet lies a dead man stripped of his trousers, still wearing one sock, and nobody in the crowd looks down at him.
A picture of armed citizens on the march did not stay welcome for long. The French government bought it at the Salon of 1831 and hung it in the Musée du Luxembourg, then took it down in 1832, after a second uprising in Paris made the authorities nervous.
From then on the canvas spent four decades going in and out of hiding. The state handed it back to the painter in 1839. It came out briefly in 1848, when a new republic replaced the monarchy, and again at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, under the Second Empire. It entered the Louvre only in 1874.
By then Liberty had begun a second career, as one of the best known images of Marianne, the figure who still stands for the French Republic on coins, stamps and official seals.
At a Glance
Artist: Eugène Delacroix (1798 to 1863), read his complete story
Made: 1830
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 260 × 325 cm (102 × 128 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris
About This Painting
Why is Liberty shown with one breast bare?
It marks her as an allegory, an idea given a body, and not a real fighter. Painters had long shown Victory and the goddesses of antiquity this way, and Delacroix had already used a female allegory in Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, in 1826.
11. Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801)
Storm clouds fill the sky in Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and a white horse rears beneath its rider, whose cloak snaps in the wind as one arm points toward the Great Saint Bernard Pass.
The rider is Bonaparte, the general the French Revolution turned into a ruler, and Jacques-Louis David painted this first version in 1801 for King Charles IV of Spain. Bonaparte had crossed that pass the year before. The men who climbed it with him would not have recognized the scene, and the man in the saddle wanted it that way.