Most people assume Liberty Leading the People depicts the French Revolution of 1789 — but it doesn’t. Eugène Delacroix painted this electrifying masterpiece in 1830, just weeks after a different uprising shook Paris and toppled King Charles X from his throne. That single misconception tells you everything about how powerfully this image has burned itself…
England did not want this painting. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1821, it failed to find a buyer and sat in the studio for three years. It took the Paris Salon of 1824 to change that — a gold medal from Charles X, and a generation of French painters who took what they saw…
One cast of this sculpture has had its legs blown apart, and the museum decided to leave it that way. In March 1970 someone planted explosives beneath the cast outside the Cleveland Museum of Art. After consulting the Musée Rodin, Cleveland concluded that restoring it would be a forgery. It stands by the entrance today,…