Esquisse pour la mairie du 6ème : Egalité. Liberté. Fraternité.

Henri Léopold Lévy's esquisse for the sixth arrondissement town hall depicting 'Egalité, Liberté, Fraternité' (1887) was a preparatory study for the official decorative program of one of Paris's principal civic spaces. Lévy was a leading history and religious painter whose capacity for large-scale decorative schemes made him a natural choice for the ambitious program of civic decoration undertaken by the Third Republic in its town halls and public buildings. The commission to depict the Republican motto was itself an ideological statement: these were the values the Republic sought to embed in the fabric of daily civic life. The work is in the Petit Palais.

The esquisse establishes the allegorical composition through which abstract republican values are personified — the characteristic approach of Third Republic decorative painting, using classical allegorical figures to embody political ideals. The handling is broadly schematic, defining the compositional arrangement rather than the final surface quality.