Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, 128" x 102.4", Musée du Louvre, Paris, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Romanticism (noun)
A style of art, first popular in the early nineteenth century, that attempted to elicit strong emotions from a viewer by presenting dramatic, exotic and sometimes frightening subjects. It was the stylistic antithesis of the rational clarity of Neo-Classicism.
Eugène Delacroix, a leader of the Romantic movement in France, painted his allegorical scene of the French Revolution of 1830 using bright color that is freely applied to the canvas. In the painting, people from different social classes come together behind their leader, the allegorical figure of Libery, who wears a Phrygian cap that symbolizes the first French Revolution of 1789.
Happy Bastille Day from The Art Minute
