For the first forty years, nobody saw this painting. Commissioned in 1814, it went into storage and the first firm record of it hanging in the Prado dates from 1872. The reason was simple: Ferdinand VII, who paid for it, was building his legitimacy on the return of a rightful monarch — not on a…
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…