The importance of the works discussed here lay not, incidentally, in their pictorial qualities alone: their revolutionary political character was at least as important. Painters such as Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet were the first to demand the autonomy of the artist as critical citizens in a society where power and authority were no longer unambiguous certainties. Citizens were gradually given a decisive voice in the political system and, above all, the freedom to choose: Catholic or liberal? Royalist or republican? Religious or freethinker? For the first time, artists were able to make ideological choices, and they wasted no time in doing so. The greatest in their ranks were no longer the visual ideologues of power, but critical thinkers in a complex society. Freedom loomed on the horizon.
A New history of western art Page 338