The ministry of Commerce and Public Works bought it from Delacroix in August 1831 for three thousand francs. It hung at the Luxembourg in 1832 and 1833, and then went into a storeroom. Forty-three years passed between the purchase and the day it was carried into the Louvre.
Three months' work, two years on a wall
Delacroix painted it between September and December 1830, in a studio he rented at 15 quai Voltaire, months after the three days of street fighting that drove Charles the Tenth out of France. It was entered for a January 1831 exhibition in aid of the wounded, under the title A Barricade, and in the end was not lent. The Salon jury passed it on 13 April and it hung from 1 May to 15 August 1831 as number 511, under the title it still officially carries: 28 July 1830. Liberty Leading the People. The king's household considered buying it for two thousand francs. The ministry paid three thousand instead, in place of a commission Delacroix had dropped — a history painting of Louis-Philippe visiting the cottage he had lodged in near Valmy.
Frépillon, Lyon, Toulouse, Chambord
By about 1833 it was in store. Around 1839 it was handed back to the painter, who left it at the house of his aunt and his cousin at Frépillon, north of Paris. The museums administration asked for it again in March 1848; Delacroix used the occasion to ask for seven thousand francs more, and was refused. He lent it to a painter and contractor in Lyon for a thousand francs. Then Louvre storerooms from 1850 to 1855, out for the Exposition universelle, back into the imperial stores from 1856 to 1863, the Luxembourg from 1863, and the Louvre in November 1874, where it was given an inventory number for the first time in 1875. Afterwards it was evacuated to Toulouse for one war and to Chambord and a château in the Sarthe for the next.
The dress is grey
It came off the wall again in September 2023 and went back up at the end of April 2024, cleaned by Bénédicte Trémolières and Laurence Mugniot. Eight layers of varnish had been laid on over two centuries to brighten the picture and had done the opposite. Underneath them the dress is light grey with hints of gold rather than yellow, and whoever worked on the painting in 1949 appears to have changed its colour. A brown mark on the dress turned out not to be Delacroix's. The Louvre's director of paintings put the result plainly: the whites and the shadows had been melting together under the yellowish layers, and this is the first generation to see them apart.
Three thousand francs in 1831, then thirty years in storerooms and a relative's spare room. She is easier to get hold of now.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.