Delacroix painted Liberty leading the people over a barricade of corpses and gave Romanticism its defining image. Liberty Leading the People (1830) shows a bare-breasted woman holding the tricolour, striding over the dead, accompanied by a boy with pistols. It commemorates the July Revolution. Delacroix included himself in the painting, wearing a top hat and carrying a rifle. Whether he actually fought on the barricades is unlikely but characteristic.

He was born in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris. His legal father was a diplomat. His biological father may have been Talleyrand, the foreign minister, which would explain several things about his career including his early access to government commissions. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Pierre-Narcisse Guerin and was influenced by Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, which showed him that contemporary events could be painted at the scale previously reserved for mythology.

His brushwork was loose and fast by the standards of the Academy. He preferred colour to line, which put him in direct opposition to Ingres, the master of precise contour. The rivalry between Delacroix and Ingres, colour versus drawing, became the central argument of French painting in the mid-nineteenth century. Delacroix won in the long run: the Impressionists claimed him, the Fauves revered him, and Cezanne called him the starting point of modern painting.

He travelled to Morocco in 1832 and came back with notebooks full of colour studies that influenced the rest of his career. The North African light loosened his palette permanently. He died in 1863, at sixty-five, and left a journal that is one of the most intelligent accounts of painting ever written.