Liberty (c. 1865–75): Art, History and Details

Liberty (c. 1865–75) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gustave Doré (French, 1832–1883).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Gustave Doré is best known for his skill as a draftsman (often seen in book illustrations), as well as for his sense of the fantastic and visionary. In the present drawing, his fluid washes and flowing lines of white add to the dramatic scene of a liberating angel breaking chains. The drawing relates to Doré's Defense of Paris (Memories of 1870), which treated an event from the recent Franco-Prussian War with a figure representing Liberty. A major difference between the painting and the drawing is that Doré represented soldiers in contemporary uniforms in the painting, but in the drawing of Liberty, he conceived a broader theme in which crowns and medieval costumes evoke an earlier time.

Object facts

• Title: Liberty
• Date: c. 1865–75
• Creator attribution: Gustave Doré (French, 1832–1883)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Brush and brown wash and gray and white gouache with graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 46.5 x 32.9 cm (18 5/16 x 12 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.383

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hotel Drouot, Paris. Catalogue Des Tableaux...son atelier par feu Gustave Doré. April 13, 1885. Lot 96.
• De Grazia, Diane. "Drawings in Cleveland: The Evolution of a Collection." In Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1-15. Diane De Grazia and Carter E. Foster, eds. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in Association with Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2000.
• De Grazia, Diane. "The Evolution of a Collection: Drawings in Cleveland." Master Drawings 38, no. 3 (2000): 249-60.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.