Which Louvre painting commemorates the July Revolution of 1830?

Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People commemorates the July Revolution of 1830.

Painted in autumn 1830, the work depicts Liberty personified as a powerful woman advancing over a barricade while carrying the French tricolour. She leads people from different social backgrounds, including a bourgeois man in a top hat and a boy carrying pistols.

The July Revolution lasted from 26 to 29 July 1830 and overthrew King Charles X. It brought Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, to the throne and established the constitutional July Monarchy. Delacroix’s painting captures the uprising’s political energy rather than showing a literal documentary scene.

The painting is often mistakenly associated with the French Revolution of 1789, partly because Liberty wears a Phrygian cap, a symbol linked with revolutionary France. The government bought it in 1831, but its political message soon made officials wary; the Louvre eventually became its permanent home in 1874.