Eugène Delacroix was the leader of the French Romantic movement and the most important French painter of the 19th century before the Impressionists. Liberty Leading the People (1830), his response to the July Revolution, fuses allegory and reportage in a way that was entirely new; it established the female figure as a symbol of France and the revolutionary ideal. He traveled to Morocco in 1832, and the rich colors and exotic subjects he discovered there refreshed his palette and gave him material for the rest of his career.
