Today is Bastille Day, or La Fête Nationale, which commemorates the start of the French Revolution in 1789, when #OnThisDay a crowd of working class Parisians stormed the Bastille prison to seize the gunpowder stored there. ⁠ ⁠ Francois Rude’s Departure of the Volunteers in 1792 (La Marseillaise) depicts a moment a few years later, when citizens were called to fight for the young French republic. In this dynamic relief sculpture, a fierce, winged female figure representing Liberty and wearing the distinctive cap worn by freed Roman slaves, urges a group of men to defend their country against Prussia and Austria, who sought to help restore the monarchy that the French had so recently abolished. This terracotta is a maquette, or model, for Rude’s famous sculpture on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.⁠ ⁠ In 1789, many French citizens celebrated liberty and equality however, many people in the French colonies remained enslaved for decades afterwards, and France did not constitutionally dismantle the institution of slavery until 1848. ⁠ ⁠ You can take a closer look at Brooklyn’s Departure of the Volunteers in 1792–and even spot Rude’s own fingerprints in the clay–in “Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art.” #BastilleDay #BkMEuropeanArt