Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People: Art Analysis
The Art of Dating and the Avant-Garde
The art of the 19th century saw two trends: Goya, leading to the avant-garde. According to Calvo Serraller, the avant-garde was a movement that appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century based on thematic, aesthetic, and plastic breaks.
Art tended to have an academic trend (like Goya), a transgressive trend, and was withheld from reality.
Movements of the 19th Century
Romanticism
Romanticism was a literary, political, artistic, and cultural movement beginning in the late 18th century and lasting until much of the nineteenth century. The romantic spirit of the works resulted from the bourgeois revolutions (French and American). These revolutions understood the idea of citizenship as a political entity, with individual rights and capable of deciding who should govern through a vote. These politicians embraced patriotism and nationalism as artistic themes.
Artists had to spend their own incomes (collected from works of art) and wanted to live. Art became an extension of the artist’s subjectivity, and the artist was expected to be honest. The romantic artist created suffering because love was heartbreaking, and patriotism was very strong (even tragic).
Liberty Leading the People
General Documentation
Title: Liberty Leading the People
Author: Eugène Delacroix
Timeline: 1830
Style: Romantic
Technique: Oil on canvas
Topic: Revolution taking place in Paris in 1830
Location: Musée du Louvre (Paris)
Formal and Stylistic Analysis
Technical and Equipment: Oil on canvas
Composition
The colors are formed by an axial axis: the first woman (Liberty) and another part by the colors red and blue that focus the viewer’s attention on the work. This work owes much to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, a work that has a triangular composition. The main character is the vertex of the triangle, as with our work where the vertex is the French flag with the woman. The same applies to the base of the triangle where the foundation works in both bodies are made up. In both works, the viewer is complicit in the action, in such cases, salvation.
Colors
Predominant colors are shades of gray and dark maroon. The color clears the landscape, because we know that Paris is the towers of Notre Dame. The colors are important to the French flag (red, white, and blue). The red flag is found on the belt at the feet of a humble man of liberty. The blue is found in the flag, the worker’s blouse, and the socks of the deceased. The white flag is found on a gorget and a shirt of a person who has died. The colors of the flag are arranged throughout the work and are subject to light, i.e., we only see the colors that are light.
The Brushstroke
Dominant color stain and violent over the line carefully. It is a very material work.
Stylistic Analysis
Delacroix was influenced by Michelangelo. Some works are characterized by:
- Triangular Composition
- Ternibilitá: That is when a character has unstoppable passion.
· Also influenced by Giorgione in the colors (red and ocher tones) and also received influences of Titian (ocher and red colors).
· Is influenced by Géricault in the composition.
· The vitality of Rubens: troubled characters, and dynamic movements
· Also was influenced by Goya in all, including brushwork and color.