One of the major public sculpture projects in France in the early decades of the 19th century was the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, built in honour of the French army. Rude was one of the artists responsible for its sculptural decoration. This head of a woman appears in the large group The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, also known as La Marseillaise, on one of the arch’s piers.. It belongs to the figure representing the spirit of Liberty.