Leader of Romantic painting, author of Liberty Leading the People
The standard-bearer of French Romantic painting, set against the Neoclassicist Ingres. Rejecting cold line and reason, he sought to strike the heart with unbridled color, turbulent composition, and intense emotion. In Liberty Leading the People, a bare-breasted Liberty raises the tricolor and, stepping over the dead, leads the people in a charge — one of the most famous images of revolution and freedom. He rekindled the flame of passion in painting.
Liberty Leading the People commemorates the Paris revolution of 1830: Liberty is embodied as a real, robust, barefoot woman, gripping a musket and raising the flag, leading workers and students over the barricade. She is not a goddess on high but a comrade in the crowd. The painting turned "liberty" from an abstraction into a figure that could bleed and charge.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.