In 2019, the Paris museum launched a major restoration campaign for large 19thᵉ century formats. The painting, produced in 1830, will return to the Louvre in spring 2024.

"Liberty Guiding the People", by Eugène Delacroix, at the Musée du Louvre.
One of the Louvre's most emblematic works. On Wednesday, September 20, Delacroix's masterpiece La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Guiding the People) left its place in one of the Paris museum's large red halls for restoration. The painting of the topless woman waving the French flag on a barricade in the midst of insurgents in the heart of Paris will undergo restoration until spring 2024, and will be temporarily replaced by the painting just opposite it, Les Femmes souliotes, by Ary Scheffer, dated 1827.

Liberty Guiding the People was painted by Delacroix (1798-1863) in 1830, the year of the fall of King Charles X and the accession of Louis-Philippe I to the throne. An allegorical work inspired by the Trois Glorieuses revolution in France, this large-format oil on canvas (3.25 m x 2.60 m) is usually exhibited alongside La Prise de Constantinople par les croisés and La Mort de Sardanapale, Delacroix's two largest paintings. The latter has itself been undergoing restoration for the past ten months, and should be back on display on September 27, according to the Musée du Louvre.

The restoration of La Liberté guidant le peuple was "prepared at length in advance by X-rays and analyses" of the canvas, and is "part of a major restoration campaign launched in 2019 for large 19th-century formats", Sébastien Allard, director of the Louvre's Department of Paintings, told Agence France-Presse. To restore the painting's brilliance, "the oxidized varnish, which has turned yellow and alters the blue-white-red chromatic range of La Liberté, must be removed using solvents", he added.

Since 2015, the Musée du Louvre has carried out over two hundred restorations, some of them major. La Belle Ferronnière, by Leonardo da Vinci (2015), La Mère infortunée, by Constance Mayer-Lamartinière (2022), Les Femmes d'Alger (2022) and Scènes des massacres de Scio (2020), by Eugène Delacroix, La Vénus du Pardo, by Titian (2016), and L'Inspiration du poète, by Nicolas Poussin (2019) have also been restored.