Liberty is a two-dimensional painting. Delacroix uses linear perspective to give the effect of 3-dimensional space. He uses aerial perspective with the city in the back being smaller with the sky blue and grey.

 

The meaning of the image, the content, is the people wanting liberty, and the battle the people went through to gain freedom. Liberty leads the people. Delacroix uses these images to tell the story – looking at the painting you know that there is a victory, a triumph – even if you are not aware of the situation.

 

The allegory of Liberty personifies by a young woman of the people wearing the Phrygian cap, her curls escaping onto her neck. Vibrant, fiery, rebellious, and victorious, she evokes the Revolution of 1789, the sans-culotte, and popular sovereignty. In her raised right hand is the red, white, and blue flag, a symbol of the struggle that unfurls toward the light like a flame.

 

Liberty wears a yellow dress reminiscent of classic dress, held in at the waist by a belt whose ends float at her side. It has slipped below her breasts, revealing the underarm hair considered vulgar by classical artists who decreed that a goddess's skin should be smooth.

 

The romantic realism of her nudity recalls the ancient winged victories. Her Greek profile, straight nose, generous mouth, a delicate chin, and smouldering gaze are reminiscent of the woman who posed for Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834).

 

She stands noble and resolute; her body is illuminated on the right, cutting a distinctive figure among the men as she turns her head to spur them on to final victory. Her dark left side stands out against a plume of smoke. Her weight is on her bare left foot, visible below her dress.

 

She may be an allegory, but this is a real battle, and she is caught up in the heat of the moment. The infantry gun with a bayonet in her left hand gives her a contemporary look and certain credibility.

 

Two Parisian boys have spontaneously joined the fight: the one on the left clings to the cobblestones, wide-eyed under his light infantry cap; the most famous figure to the right of Liberty is Gavroche, a symbol of youthful revolt against injustice and sacrifice for a noble cause. He wears the black velvet beret (or faluche) popular with students, as a symbol of rebellion, and carries an overlarge cartridge pouch slung across his shoulder. He advances right foot forward, brandishing cavalry pistols with one arm raised, a war cry on his lips as he exhorts the insurgents to fight.

 

The fighter whose beret carries a white royalist cockade and liberal red ribbon and who carries an infantry sabre (1816 model), is recognisably a print worker with his apron and sailor trousers. The scarf holding his pistol in place on his belly evokes the Cholet handkerchief—a rallying sign for Royalist leader Charette and the Vendeans.

 

The kneeling figure with the top hat of a bourgeois or fashionable urbanite may be Delacroix himself, or one of his friends. He wears loose-fitting trousers and an artisan's red flannel belt and carries a double-barrelled hunting gun. The wounded man raising himself up at the sight of Liberty wears a knotted yellowish scarf, echoing the colour of the heroine's dress; his peasant's smock and red flannel belt suggest the temporary workers of Paris. The blue jacket, red belt, and white shirt echo the colours of the flag.

 

The images of hats play a crucial role in the painting. This seemingly minor detail conveys an important aspect of what is being communicated in Liberty Leading the People - except for the monarchy, all social classes participated in the revolt, as telegraphed by the hats worn by the fighters.

 

The factory worker with an uplifted sabre (on the left) sports the hat typical of his class; next to Liberty is a young man waving two pistols and wearing the black beret traditionally worn by university students. Top hats were worn at the time by all social classes, and cloth hats often worn by printers.

 

But Liberty herself steals the show. Not only is she a symbol of bravery, persistence, and leadership, but she reminds viewers that women played an indispensable role in the events of July 1830.

 

With a Greek profile and exposed breasts, she is reminis

cent of ancient statuary, an allegory of revolution set in a realistic battle scene. She, too, wears a hat; her Phrygian cap was a widely recognised symbol of liberty during the French Revolution. She grasps a musket in one hand and the new Tricolour in the other.

 

Liberty is very much in scale and proportion. The art is in proportion because of the relationship between the parts to each other. No figure is larger than any other figure. An example is a young man to the right of Liberty. He is not bigger than the older men to the left of Liberty. The figures are in scale because the figures are the standard or expected size. The shape (hands, arms, feet, torso, and head) is all in the right scale to the actual bodily parts of a person.

 

Delacroix’s spirit is fully involved in its implementation of Liberty Leading the People. He executes the work with the heroic poses of the people fighting for liberty, the outstretched figure of Liberty, the dead figures, and the attitudes of the people following Liberty. Delacroix has given this painting a sense of full participation; no one is passive in the painting. This work has been called the first overtly political work of modern art.

 

Shown at the Salon of 1831, the painting has been understood in various ways and caused quite an uproar. Critics said that the painting was a slander of the three glorious days, that Liberty was ignoble, and that the insurgents represented a rude class of people, urchins and workmen. The newly blossoming bourgeoisie was shocked by the painting – it was seen as crude and unnecessary.