His disappearance caused disappointment in the rooms of the Louvre, but his brilliant return proves that it was worth the wait. After more than six months of restoration, the public will discover the true colors of a global icon of painting from Thursday: Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, yellowed by decades of layers of varnish and grime.
“We are the first generation who will rediscover the color of Delacroix,” rejoices Sébastien Allard, director of the paintings department at the Louvre.
The painting, created by Eugène Delacroix in 1830, which, outside the Louvre, could only be admired at its branch in Lens (North) and in Japan in 1999, represents an allegory of freedom: a bare-breasted woman brandishing the blue, white, red cockade on a barricade among insurgents, in the heart of Paris.
“Until now we lost the richness of the chromatic intensity, the planes, the whites, the shadows, all of this was unified under these yellowish layers”, underlines this manager who observed the metamorphosis of the painting in a transformed museum room in the restoration workshop.
Because, over time, eight layers of varnish were applied to the painting to enhance the colors before drowning them in a dull yellow mass, in which “dirt and dust” were also trapped, according to him.
The last major restoration dated from 1949. This was carried out as part of a campaign launched in 2019 for large formats from the 19th century.
A story full of violence and exaltation
And it’s a “revelation,” says Sébastien Allard: grays, blacks, browns and whites once again illuminate the canvas, white smoke comes out of the weapons and dust rises above the barricades, the blue sky emerges above the towers of Notre-Dame in the background, like all the details of a story full of violence and exaltation.
“It’s an enchantment to see a pictorial material in very good condition appear under the varnish with vibrant touches, we have the impression of being at the heart of creation,” Bénédicte Trémolières, one of the artists, told AFP. of the two restorers selected for this mission.
“Delacroix hid everywhere small touches of blue, white, red colors, dotted in a subtle way as if echoing the flag and which were no longer perceptible at all,” adds his colleague, Laurence Mugniot, showing “the blue pupil with a touch of red” of a character or the “costume of a Swiss Guard”.
Like other large formats, the immense canvas (2.60 m high by 3.25 m wide without the frame) could not be transported to the workshop of the Research and Restoration Center Museums of France (C2RMF).
To assess the extent of the work, the specialists relied on “archives and old photos” and carried out “meticulous analyzes of the canvas, passed through infrared, X-rays and ultraviolet”, Côme Fabre told AFP, curator in the paintings department of the Louvre, in charge of the 19th century.
Many symbols behind this work
The restorers then carried out “tests” on tiny parts of the painting. Equipped with binocular magnifying glasses and microscopes, “they notably discovered that certain alterations, including a brown mark on Liberty’s dress, had been added after Delacroix and that they could therefore be removed,” he reveals.
The painting arrived at the Louvre in 1874. It has always belonged to the State, which purchased it during its first public exhibition in 1831.
If it represents the revolution of July 1830, many meanings have been given to it: “the Revolution, Marianne, the French Republic, France in general, repeated extensively on posters, at the time of the Liberation of Paris in 1944, on banknotes or stamps,” explains the curator.
In 2019, the artist Pascal Boyart, who signed PBOY, created a mural in eastern Paris entitled Liberty leading the people of the yellow vests.
Because “the brilliant idea of Delacroix, according to Côme Fabre, is to have succeeded in representing collective action in motion, which cannot be stopped, with men united around a woman, who embodies the ‘idea of freedom’.
