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Louvre: La Liberté guidant le peuple

Liberty leads the people in Eugene Delacroix's depiction of the 1830 revolution in France, closer to the time of Les Miserables than the French Revolution of 1789. I found out that there is some debate as to whether the top-hatted gentleman or the dead man with one blue sock and white shirt (head cropped out of this photo) is a self-portrait of Delacroix. I think if I were the painter, I'd opt for depiciting myself as nattily attired and carrying a loaded weapon, but others argue that the dead man is the painter's way of acknowledging his own impotence. This obviously requires more study than one can glean from a few words on the internet and to my knowledge George Sand never commented on the impotence angle.

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Uploaded on July 5, 2009
Taken on June 28, 2009