m] toitov utji nk c - yale university press · {] iw b w io ^z v[zp ivq z[ _j {h iw ok j oy iw vj...

$: M] TOITOV UTJI NK C - Yale University Press · {] iw b w io ^z v[zp ivq z[ _j {h iw ok j oy iw vj fo kt 4 {ss kvxwi j kz jz kg z[ 4mo m_k i oy iw vj mh^sv]_ivop r_ d ^z ik_pjrvi iz$
Delaroche 9.indd 2Delaroche 9.indd 2 21/12/2009 16:0021/12/2009 16:00

painting historydelaroche and lady jane grey

Cstephen bann and linda whiteley

with john guy, christopher riopelleand anne robbins

National Gallery Company, LondonDistributed by Yale University Press


This catalogue is published to accompanythe exhibition Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane GreyThe National Gallery, London, 24 February to 23 May 2010

Copyright© 2010 National Gallery Company LimitedThe Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

recording, or any storage and retrieval system, without the priorpermission in writing of the publisher.

First published in Great Britain in 2010 byNational Gallery Company LimitedSt Vincent House · 30 Orange Street

London WC2H 7HHwww.nationalgallery.co.uk

ISBN: 9 78185709 479 4525401

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.A catalogue record is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009937847

Publisher Louise RiceProject Editor Claire YoungEditor Rebecca McKie

Picture Researcher Suzanne BosmanProduction Jane Hyne and Penny Le Tissier

Designed and typeset in Brunel by DalrympleReproduction by Altaimage, LondonPrinted in Italy by Conti Tipocolour

Cover, pages 8, 16, 24, 34 and 106–7 (details): Paul Delaroche (1797–1856),The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833. Oil on canvas, double-lined, 251 x 302 cm.

The National Gallery, London (NG53).

Opposite title page: Jules-Gabriel Levasseur (1823–about 1900),aFer Eugène Buttura (1812–1852), Portrait of Paul Delaroche, 1853.

Engraving on paper, 28x21.5 cm. Private Collection


Contents^

Director’s Foreword · 6

Authors’ Acknowledgements · 7

The Story of Lady Jane Grey · 9John Guy

Lost and Found · 17Christopher Riopelle

The Sense of the Past · 25Linda Whiteley

The Victim as Spectacle:Paul Delaroche’s ‘Lady Jane Grey’ and Mademoiselle Anaïs · 35

Stephen Bann

CATALOGUE · 46Stephen Bann and Linda Whiteley,

with Christopher Riopelle and Anne Robbins

Paul Delaroche: Chronology · 157Anne Robbins

Lenders to the Exhibition · 160

Bibliography · 161

Photographic Credits · 166

Appendix and IndeX · 167


8 | ADD RUNNING FOOT?


PAINTING HISTORY | 9

The Story of Lady Jane Greyjohn guy

^

JANE GREY HAS ALWAYS been enveloped in myth. Her date ofbirth is invariably wrongly stated, and allegations that her fatherverbally and physically abused her as a child have been invented

over the centuries to turn her into a victim as well as a tragic heroine(fig. 1).¹ She was born at Bradgate in Leicestershire on the edge of theCharnwood Forest in the spring of 1537, the eldest surviving child ofFrances Brandon, Henry VIII’s niece, and her husband Henry Grey,Marquis of Dorset (later Duke of Suffolk).² Her father, unusuallywell educated for a nobleman, was a bibliophile. Both Jane’s parentssympathised with the humanist and evangelical reformers, and she re-ceived a superb education based on the model that Sir Thomas Morehad devised for his eldest daughter, Margaret.As a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor

dynasty, and a second cousin to Edward VI and his half-sisters Maryand Elizabeth, Jane was close to the court and its politics (see Jane’sclaim to the throne on p. 10). By the terms of Henry VIII’s will, shouldhis own children die without heirs, she was next in line of royal suc-cession aFer any son that her parents might have.³ And by the age of11 she had caught the eye of Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, oneof King Edward’s uncles, who had married Henry VIII’s sixth queen,Katherine Parr, shortly aFer Henry’s death. Seymour had a schemeto marry Jane to Edward, and he bargained with the Greys for herwardship.4 Jane was briefly installed at Seymour Place in London, buta serious scandal involving Seymour’s ambitions and his relationshipwith the young Elizabeth, on whom he also had designs, led to his falland execution on a charge of treason, and Jane returned to Bradgateto resume her studies.In the summer of 1550, Roger Ascham, the most famous Tudor

educationalist, visited Bradgate, where he found Jane reading Plato’sPhaedo in Greek ‘and that with as much delight as some gentlemenwould read a merry tale in Boccaccio’. When he asked why she was notout hunting with her family in the park, she smiled and said smugly:‘All their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I findin Plato.’5AFerwards, Ascham discreetly hinted that Jane was a betterscholar than her cousin Elizabeth, whose tutor he briefly was.6

When Jane was ‘just fourteen’ in May 1551, her own tutor, JohnAylmer, praised her in a letter to the leading Swiss reformer HeinrichBullinger.7 Jane was encouraged to write to Bullinger herself: an ex-iled German divine, John of Ulm, visiting Bradgate that spring, wasshown a copy of one of these letters.8 Although formal, sententiousand awkward, her letters to Bullinger are in faultless Latin. ‘In writingto you in this manner’, she explains, ‘I have exhibited more boldnessthan prudence: but so great has been your kindness towards me, incondescending to write to me, a stranger, and in supplying the nec-essary instruction for the adornment of my understanding and theimprovement of my mind, that I should justly appear chargeable withneglect and forgetfulness of duty, were I not to show myself mindfulof you and of your deservings in every possible way.’9 She began tostudy Hebrew as well as Greek, so that she could read the Old andNew Testaments in the original, and a year or so later, Mildred Cooke,a kinswoman and another brilliant intellectual, the wife of Sir WilliamCecil, Elizabeth I’s future chief minister, sent her the Greek homiliesof Saint Basil.¹0As Jane matured, she became increasingly confident and asser-

tive, determined to cultivate her status as an evangelical Protestantfigurehead and not averse to one-upmanship. Although she had lovedfine clothes and braided hair as a child, when urged by her father andtutor to imitate her cousin Elizabeth in dressing plainly, she quicklygot the message, and when sent a costly dress of ‘tinsel, cloth of gold,and velvet, laid on with parchment lace of gold’ as a New Year’s giFby Mary, a staunch Catholic, she asked curtly: ‘ “What shall I do withit?” “Marry,” said a gentlewoman, “Wear it.” “Nay,” quoth she, “thatwere a shame to follow my Lady Mary against God’s word, and leavemy Lady Elizabeth, which followeth God’s word.” ’¹¹Religion lay at the heart of the political crisis in Edward VI’s reign.

In the spring of 1553, when Jane was 16, the young king fell mortally illand planned to exclude his sisters from the succession.He believed thatneither could be trusted not to reverse or modify his new Protestantsettlement. He was convinced that both were legally barred frominheriting the crown, for both had been declared illegitimate by his


10 | THE STORY OF LADY JANE GREY

The Tudor Succession^

m.Catherineof Aragon

Arthurd. 1502

HENRY VIII1509–1547

m.

(1) Catherineof Aragonm. 1509,div. 1533,d. 1536

(2) Anne Boleynm. 1533,ex. 1536

(3) Jane Seymourm. 1536,d. 1537

Philip II

of Spaind. 1598

m. MARY I1553–1558

ELIZABETH I1558–1603

EDWARD VI1547–1553

Margaret Tudord. 1541

m.Matthew

Earl of Lennoxd. 1571

(1) Madeleine

daughter of

Francis I of Franced. 1537

(2) Mary of Guised. 1560

MaryQueen of Scotsex. 1587m.

Mary Tudord. 1533

m.

(1) Louis XII

of Franced. 1515

(2) Charles Brandon

Duke of Suffolkd.1545

Henry Grey

Duke of Suffolkex. 1554

Frances Brandon

Duchess of Suffolkd. 1559

HENRY VII1485–1509

Elizabeth of York1466–1503

JANE GREYproclaimedqueen 1553ex. 1554

m.

Lord Guildford

Dudleyex. 1554

KatherineGrey d. 1568

Mary Greyd. 1578

(1) Henry

Lord Herbert

diss. 1554

(2) Edward Seymour

Earl of Hertford

d. 1621

m.

d.

diss.

div.

ex.

m.

died

dissolved

divorced

executed

married

m.

m.

(1) James IVof Scotlandd. 1513

James V

of Scotlandd. 1542

m.

(2) ArchibaldEarl of Angusdiv. 1528

Margaret Douglas

Countessof Lennoxd. 1578

m.

(1) Francis II of France

d. 1560

(2) Henry

Lord Darnley

d. 1567

(3) James Hepburn

Earl of Bothwell

d. 1578

JAMES I of England

and VI of Scotland



father’s Parliaments.¹² At this stage the idea that any woman, includ-ing Jane Grey, might succeed him was anathema to Edward. Whenin April he first began to jot down his ideas to ‘devise’ the crown to aProtestant heir, his tuberculosis was in remission and he envisagedthat before his death, Jane’s mother, Frances, would have a son or thatJane herself would marry and that her son would be the rightful suc-cessor. To this end, a series of dynastic marriages was hastily arrangedin late May by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the effectiveregent: Northumberland’s son, Guildford Dudley, was married to Janeand his allies betrothed to her sisters.But inJune 1553, itwasclear thatEdwardwasdying.With insufficient

time to summon Parliament, he therefore ‘devised’ the crown ‘to theL[ady] Jane and her heires masles’, followed by her sisters Katherineand Mary, and by the eldest son of their cousin Margaret Clifford ifthey died without heirs.¹³ How far Edward was Northumberland’spuppet in making his ‘device’ is hotly contested, but the original docu-ment is in Edward’s own handwriting throughout (fig. 2).When Edward died on 6 July and Jane discovered she was queen,

she wept, but prayed to God that: ‘If what was given to me was rightlymine, His DivineMajesty would grantme such grace as to enableme togovern this Kingdomwith his approbation and to his glory.’¹4Althoughnot officially proclaimed queen at the Tower until the 10th, she sawherself as born to lead the Protestant cause. Many historians have de-picted Jane as innocent and manipulated, but she had been aware ofthe contents of Edward’s ‘device’ since at least the 7th, and despite hermother’s anger on first learning that she herself had been passed over,the family was united behind her. What did genuinely shock Jane, andwhere she was naive, was in not realising that she would have to satisfyher new husband, Guildford, who demanded to be king. A furious rowerupted between them at the Tower aFer Jane was handed the crownjewels. Married in haste to a man she barely knew, she was never inlove, and told Guildford he could only be a duke.¹5 Hearing this, herefused to sleep with her any longer until prevailed on to relent by theEarls of Arundel and Pembroke.¹6Jane ruled until 19 July. Whether she was the Nine Days’ Queen

depends on whether her reign is said to have begun with her acces-sion proclamation on the 10th or with Edward’s death on the 6th, inwhich case she ruled for almost a fortnight. Her reign ended whenthe Catholic Mary, who considered herself to be the rightful heir, leda successful counter-coup. Warned of Edward’s death, Mary had es-caped to East Anglia to muster her forces. In any case, the Protestantswere divided. Bishop Ridley of London preached vigorously for Jane,but John Bradford predicted civil war and suggested that Edward’s

‘device’ had been the product of a deranged mind.¹7 Although theyoung king had legally bound his privy councillors, nobles and judgesto observe his ‘device’ in the final days of his life, their consent had beenextracted by fear and threats, and most people, especially the citizensof London, continued to support Mary. The Duke of Northumberlandwas sent with an army to defeat her, but when a naval squadron offthe Norfolk coast defected and handed over their artillery to her, histroops melted away.As late as the 18th, Jane was still sending out letters signed ‘Jane

the Quene’ to sheriffs and magistrates ordering them to rally andemphasising that her rule was founded on ‘consent’ to Edward’s‘device’.¹8 But even her kinsman William Cecil was among those pre-paring to slip away to Mary. ‘And seeing great perils threatened uponus by the likeness of the time’, he had scribbled in a note to Mildred, ‘Ido make choice to avoid the peril of God’s displeasure.’¹9By late July, Mary had recovered the capital and the Dudleys were

imprisoned in the Tower. Jane, stripped of the crown jewels and hercanopy of state, was escorted from the royal apartments and mockedby the guard. For the next six months she was lodged at the house ofWilliam Partridge, an officer in the royal ordnance within the Tower,where on 29 August the anonymous author of the Chronicle of QueenJane, the most vivid and authentic account of the events of 1553–4,had dinner with her.²0 Sitting in the place of honour ‘at the board’send’, she made him welcome and asked for news of the outside world,before launching into a stinging attack on Northumberland, whohad been executed a week before aFer a spectacular recantation and

[FIG. 1] Attributed to Levina Teerlinc(about 1520–1576), Portrait of a Lady,possibly Lady Jane Grey, possibly 1553.Body colour on thin card, 4.8 cmdiameter, Yale Center for BritishArt. Paul Mellon Collection, NewHaven (B1974.2.59). The jewelon her breast and the sprayof foliage inserted behind itsuggest that the sitter is LadyJane Grey aFer her marriageto Guildford Dudley in May1553. The ‘ANO XVIII’ (i.e.‘anno aetatis xviii’) inscriptionpresents a difficulty in that Janewas not quite seventeen whenshe was executed; however, suchinscriptions are not always reliable.





Lost and Foundchristopher riopelle

^

Tate on an emergency footing. Nine ground-floor galleries were tem-porarily abandoned. Loan exhibitions were cancelled. Conservationwork immediately began on endangered pieces, not least 14 paint-ings by Turner and thousands of works on paper.³ In the commotion,Delaroche’s canvas was not judged a priority. Listing it along withthe Martin among the 18 spoiled paintings, the authors of the 1930report added that in any event ‘few of these … would be regarded asof primary importance from an artistic point of view’.4 Lady Jane Greywas rolled up, put away and, having been dismissed as aestheticallynegligible, forgotten. In 1959 it was definitively listed as ‘destroyed’.5Strange fate for an artist whose reputation had once ranked with

those of his acclaimed contemporaries Delacroix and Ingres! By com-mon consent, Lady Jane Grey was among Delaroche’s masterpieces.It had figured in one of the most significant collections of contem-porary art of the day, that of the richissime Russian Count AnatoleDemidoff, later Prince of San Donato. Prints aFer it were dissemi-nated worldwide (cat. 78). Indeed, it had been an artistic cause célèbreof France’s July Monarchy, famous from the moment it first went ondisplay at the Paris Salon of 1834. Every day throughout the run ofthe exhibition, admiring crowds gathered in front of it. They foundthemselves inexorably drawn to the poignant image of the 17-year-old,blindfolded queen as she groped her way pitiably to the executionblock. They were pulled in too by the intense realism of the scene,painted as if happening in our own space, and by the extrême perfec-tion of its details, as one critic had it, including the rustling silk of thegirl’s dress and the strands of hay into which her severed head wouldsoon fall. Lady Jane Grey secured the reputation Delaroche had be-gun to build in the 1820s for his depictions of scenes from Englishhistory. With it he again demonstrated his uncanny ability, as thecritic Tardieu characterised it, to find ‘subjects that attack the nerv-ous system of the public’.6 History seemed very real here, and utterlypresent. As another critic noted of the Lady Jane Grey phenomenon,Delaroche’s ‘name is repeated in every salon, in every shop, with thepraises which accompanied that of M. Gérard fiFeen years ago, thatof David thirty years ago’.7

IN THE SPRING OF 1973, a young curator at the Tate Gallery wasat work on his first book, a monograph on the English Romanticpainter John Martin. Christopher Johnstone, who would go on to

direct the Auckland City Art Gallery in New Zealand, wanted to learnmore about Martin’s first major commission, The Destruction of Pompeiiand Herculaneum. A monumental painting of 1822, it had entered theTate in 1918, but according to reports had been lost there, along withseveral other works, when the Thames flooded the Gallery basementin the early hours of Saturday 7 January 1928. A report of 1930 statedthat 18 oil paintings had been ‘completely spoiled’ in the flood, amongthem the Martin.¹ Decades later rumours circulated to the contrary.‘Someone had told me,’ Johnstone recalled, ‘that some of the paint-ings listed as lost or damaged beyond repair were not.’²Acting on a hunch, Johnstone persuaded Tate conservators to

double-check rolled canvases which had long been stored under largetables in the conservation studios. ‘There were quite a few rolled worksthere. No one had looked at them for a very long time. … No one hadthe faintest idea what was there – there were no labels attached.’Knowing the dimensions of the Martin, they looked for a large roll.Johnstone recalls the excitement as unfurling began, for it was thenthat they discovered the Martin largely intact, if battered. And therewas an unexpected bonus. Bound up with it in the same roll was an-other monumental canvas that had been listed as lost in the flood,Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey (cat. 53). ‘My memorywas that the Martin had a corner chopped out,’ he recalled, ‘but theDelaroche was pristine.’ A photograph of the latter taken soon aFerthe rediscovery confirms that the canvas was, by and large, in soundcondition (fig. 4).Lady Jane Grey had been bequeathed to the National Gallery

by Lord Cheylesmore and accepted by the Board of Trustees on16 December 1902. Two days later, on 18 December, it was transferredto the Tate Gallery, then known as the National Gallery Millbank,where paintings of the Modern Foreign Schools were displayed. Itssubsequent exhibition history is complicated; by 1928, however, it wasno longer on view but relegated to the basement. The flood put the


20 | LOST AND FOUND

has continued to this day. Such are the crowds which gather even nowto study the canvas in rapt admiration that the polish on the woodenfloor directly in front is repeatedly worn away and must be regularlyrenewed by caretaking staff. Lady Jane Grey has remained on viewcontinuously for 35 years now; on the one occasion when it was loanedto a travelling exhibition in 2003, Gallery officials soon heard aboutvisitors’ displeasure. Parents are keen to show it to their children, andenraptured schoolchildren to show it to their parents. Lady Jane Greyis high on the list of reasons why people come to the National Gallery.In the meantime, critics and art historians have caught up with

the general public. Thanks to Delaroche exhibitions and monographs

in recent decades, and surveys in which he figures with increasingprominence, he again plays a significant role in discussions of nine-teenth-century art. Once more his achievement is assessed in relationto Delacroix and Ingres, and not dismissively. It is in this context ofcontinued public fascination and growing scholarly appreciation thatthe present exhibition examines in depth the genesis of a remark-able painting which once survived a flood but had been written offnonetheless.

No less remarkable, a second major painting by Delaroche has re-cently emerged from obscurity. It too had been rolled up and storedaway a�er suffering damage, in this case almost 70 years ago, and itsreappearance now may well prove as significant for an evolving assess-ment of Delaroche’s achievement as the rediscovery of Lady Jane Greydid in 1973.

[FIG. 6] H.H. Armstead (sculptor, 1828–1905), Albert Memorial frieze,detail showing the Podium of the Painters, London (constructed 1872). PaulDelaroche is shown seated in the centre. Positioned behind him from thele� are Delacroix, Vernet, Ingres and Decamps.



Charles I insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell (fig. 7) depicts the mock-ery and disdain to which the monarch was subjected by loutish guardsin the days leading to his execution. The painting was commissionedby Lord Francis Egerton, the future Earl of Ellesmere, at the heightof Delaroche’s fame in the mid-1830s. His brother, the Duke ofSutherland, also acquired a painting on an English historical themeat the same time. On a visit to the artist’s studio early in January 1836Sutherland was able to study that work for the first time, pronouncingStrafford on his Way to Execution (cat. 54) ‘one of the finest modernpictures I ever saw’. Egerton would be just as satisfied with his paint-ing, the duke reassured their mother, as he had Delaroche’s word that‘Charles I will be as good’. ¹9 The two paintings were exhibited publiclyfor the first time at the Paris Salon of 1837. Perhaps because they werepainted for scions of an august British family, they are sometimes de-scribed as pendants.²0 That the artist did not consider them so, andthat he held Charles I in particular regard, is suggested by the requesthe made in the final days of the exhibition. Would the organisers be sokind as to move the painting into the prestigious Salon Carré of the

[FIG. 7] Paul Delaroche(1797–1856), Charles I insulted by theSoldiers of Cromwell, 1837 (detail).Oil on canvas, 284 x 392 cm.Private collection.This painting was badly damagedduring the bombing of BridgewaterHouse, London, in 1941 (see fig. 8).This photograph was taken duringtreatment at the National GalleryConservation Department in 2009.The photograph was taken from anacute angle.

Louvre – the room that gave the annual exhibition its name – and tohang it in the exact same place, ‘and at the same height’, where LadyJane Grey had hung – and where it had enjoyed unprecedented publicacclaim – three years earlier, at the Salon of ’34? ‘You see that I amnot modest,’ he wrote.²¹The success of 1834 was not to be repeated. This time around, the

public largely ignored the artist’s paintings, and critics were divided.Perhaps that is why Delaroche sought to rehang his strongest submis-sion in a more advantageous position before it was too late. It doesn’tseem to have helped. Summing up his assessment of Delaroche’ssubmissions that year – the third picture he showed was Saint Cecilia(cat. 58) – Théophile Gautier declared the 1837 Salon a ‘fiasco’ forthe artist.²² The frenzy that in the past had greeted his monumentaldepictions of moving moments from English history had begun to dis-sipate, in France at least. It was the last Paris Salon to whichDelarochewould ever send his works. Charles I and Strafford were brought toBritain when the exhibition closed. The former canvas never returnedto France. The death of the Earl of Ellesmere prevented it from





The Sense of the Pastlinda whiteley

^

I N 1823, SIR WALTER SCOTT published his first novel on a Frenchtheme, a chronicle of the life and times of a real historical figure,Louis XI of France, seen through the eyes of an imaginary one:

Quentin Durward, a Scottish archer. In contrast to his usual rapidpace of composition, Quentin Durward necessitated many hours ofresearch, much of it in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh.¹ One ofthe initial sources of Scott’s inspiration for the book, however, sprangfrom the visit of his friend, James Skene (a fellow advocate andamateur painter), newly back from a tour in France, with travel ac-counts, sketches and a collection of manuscripts, a resource to delighta novelist-antiquarian, eager to take a subject at some distance fromhis customary interests. Skene’s architectural sketches must have beenof special interest in this context, since the ancient castle of Plessis-les-Tours, west of Tours, was to play a central role in the narrative. Whilein Aix-en-Provence, where for some time he had a house, Skene hadcome to know the Marquis de Forbin, the descendant of an ancientProvençal family. The Marquis gave him a vivid account of the revo-lutionary years, and of the resulting devastation of his own chateau,La Barben (fig. 9), an account which Walter Scott was to adapt, inhis introduction to Quentin Durward, as a fictional visit to a noblemanin whose ‘curious Gothic library’, he pored over ancient chronicleswhich, he claimed, formed the basis for the novel.²While living in Aix,where he had a number of friends, Skene may have come across a copyof one of the earliest volumes of the Voyages pittoresques et romantiquesen l’ancienne France, a picturesque tour by Charles Nodier and IsidoreTaylor, published from 1820, in which the link between medieval archi-tecture and the history of ‘l’ancienne France’ was reinforced on almostevery page (cat. 7). In Charles Nodier’s words: ‘As for ourselves, thelast travellers among the ruins of old France, shortly to disappear,we choose to depict only those ruins whose secrets and whose historywould otherwise be lost forever…’³ Scott was already keenly aware ofthe power of buildings to evoke poetic and historic associations, andthus to stimulate literary creation; in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, pub-lished in 1805, the destiny of the St Clair family is embedded within thestones of Rosslyn Chapel (cat. 3):

Blaz’d battlement, and pinnet high,

Blaz’d every rose-carved buttress fair

So still they blaze, when fate is nigh,

The lowly line of high St Clair.4

Antiquarianism, the collection and study of historical remains, hadbeen satirised since the seventeenth century as the pursuit of antiquetrivia by unworldly scholars. In early nineteenth-century France, how-ever, it took a particularly popular and emotive form, in reaction tothe destruction of antiquities during the Revolution. The Musée desmonuments français, set up by Alexandre Lenoir in an abandonedmonastery in Paris as a refuge for fragments of monuments and otherworks of art salvaged from destruction, became a place where whatwas lost could be reconstructed through the evocative power of relics.5Lenoir transformed the collection, set up originally as a simple reposi-tory, into a fashionable museum which was open to the public from1795. It was divided into a series of rooms, each evoking a particularperiod of the French past. A number of artists, including FleuryRichard, Charles-Marie Bouton and Henriette Lorimier (cats. 1, 6),responded to the ‘inspiration of the past’ embodied in the museum,not only by incorporating the ‘real’ appearance of ancient artefactsinto their work, but at times evoking by scenes from history whichotherwise might have been leF to the imagination of the visitor. WhenBouton painted the Fourteenth-Century Room in the museum, he con-verted it, as it were, into a theatrical set, for the staging of the madnessof Charles VI. This kind of evocation was to have a number of parallelswith the pages of the Voyages pittoresques, to which Bouton himself (aswell as a number of theatrical scene-painters) contributed.The response of historians and artists to Lenoir’s museum was ech-

oed throughout France wherever there were ruins of ancient buildingsdestroyed by the Revolution. François-Marius Granet, one of the pio-neers of ‘historic genre’, was first moved to paint a picture of this typeby the sight of a moonlit Paris cloister which had been laid to wasteduring the Revolution,6 while the haunting atmosphere of his Choir ofthe Capuchin Church (cat. 2), his most famous work, was inspired by the





The Victim as Spectacle: Paul Delaroche’s‘Lady Jane Grey’ and Mademoiselle Anaïs

stephen bann^

ON 30MARCH 1844, the first performance of Alexandre Soumet’splay Jane Grey took place at the Odéon Theatre in Paris. AFerthe execution scene, according to the stage directions: ‘There

appears in the distance the picture by M. Paul Delaroche’. This wasnot the very painting that the admiring Parisian public had seen adecade before at the 1834 Salon. That had passed into the collectionof the wealthy Russian Count Anatole Demidoff, and would not bevisible until the retrospective following the artist’s death in 1856. ButSoumet assumed that theatregoers would recall seeing the originalpicture in 1834, or at least be familiar with one of the engraved repro-ductions that appeared in illustrated magazines. Here is an episodewhere Delaroche’s kinship with theatre is evident, and it leads to thefollowing question. How may we understand the close link betweenThe Execution of Lady Jane Grey and the practices of dramatic represen-tation current in Paris over the period? I shall attempt to answer thisquestion on two levels, first by underlining the relevance to his work ofthe concept of ‘spectacle’, and secondly by focusing on his relationshipwith one particular actress, Mademoiselle Anaïs, which helps us tounderstand the special appeal of his Lady Jane Grey.In this debate about painting and theatre, it is not just a question

of the painter copying dramatic effects. Even where Delaroche ap-pears close to theatrical spectacle, the objective is to reinvigorate theart of picture-making. When the noted critic and novelist Stendhalappraised Delaroche’s Death of Elizabeth at the 1827/8 Salon, he madethe distinction clear by condemning the tendency of French paintersto ‘répétition’; by this he explicitly meant copying the manner of theclassical actor François-Joseph Talma, which had ‘ruined the picturesof the old adherents of David’. With reference to this aping of theconventional gestures of the stage, Stendhal claimed: ‘The Death ofQueen Elizabeth, by M. Delaroche, is free from this unfortunate fault.Thus the spectator believes himself to be taking part in this terrifyingspectacle.’¹ For Stendhal, Delaroche’s achievement was precisely tohave broken with the clichés of Neoclassicism, and to have inaugu-rated a new, intense form of audience participation, giving the illusionof being a witness to the event portrayed. In 1850, Delaroche’s pupil,

the painter Ernest Hébert, reinforced this claim in a letter which pin-pointed the achievement: ‘you are the man who succeeded in movingpeople through the profound observation of concentrated drama, andthrough veiled terror (the gesture of Jane Gray [sic], the dog of thePrinces in the Tower). The [Assassination of ] the Duc de Guise is amasterpiece and perhaps even the masterpiece of present times.’²Yet we get no further by endorsing contemporary judgements that

credit the success of Delaroche’s paintings to their kinship with spec-tacle. What must be explained is the variety of different levels throughwhich this new direction may be understood, and especially its inte-gral connection with Delaroche’s representation of victimhood. Thetheme of the victim, or martyr, runs throughout his entire career, andis central to this exhibition. It is definitively expressed in his renderingof Lady Jane Grey. The previously unpublished material relating toDelaroche’s personal life in the period when he was painting this worksuggests a new dimension to his involvement in theatre. It does notin itself explain the dramatic effect of the work. But it shows that theemotional appeal of the historical victim was intensified, in this case,by Delaroche’s passion for a luminary of the stage.Before turning to biography, however, it is necessary to give

an account of Delaroche’s position as a rising young artist in post-Napoleonic France, which will demonstrate the differing facets ofhis engagement with ‘spectacle’. The novelist Balzac, whose Comédiehumaine is a barometer of the national scene, visualises two studentsliving penuriously in a garret in the Latin Quarter in the early 1830s,and taking stock of the turbulent history of their times: ‘We looked onall these things as a spectacle, and we complained about them withoutourselves taking sides.’³ In the mid-1820s Balzac inhabited the samebuilding in the present rue Visconti as Delaroche and his friend fromBaron Gros’ studio, Eugène Lami. The situation of these rising youngartists would not have been very different from the fictional case im-agined by Balzac. Born in 1797 to the family of a cultivated but hardlywealthy picture dealer, Delaroche had just reached adulthood whenWaterloo sealed Napoleon’s defeat, and the exiled Bourbons returnedto rule France through an untried system of constitutional monarchy


46 | PAINTING HISTORY

HENRIETTE LORIMIER (1775–1854)

[1] Jeanne de Navarre and her Sonat the Tomb of Jean V, 1806Oil on canvas, 199 x 168.5 cmMusée National des Châteaux de Malmaisonet Bois-Préau (MM88-5-1)

Provenance: bought for Empress Josephine, 1807; bydescent to Queen Hortense; returned to the heirs ofNapoleon III, 1881; Empress Eugènie’s sale, 1881; Parisart market, 1988; acquired, Paris art market, 1994.

At first a mere depot for objects removedfrom churches and convents in the yearsfollowing the Revolution, then picturesquelytransformed by Alexandre Lenoir, whotook charge of it in 1792, the Musée desmonuments français (as it came to be known)opened on a permanent footing in 1795, inthe abandoned convent of the Augustins. Itsurvived there until 1816, the year followingthe Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.Though this was not the original intention,this display of sculptural and architecturalfragments, chiefly from France’s medievalpast, in a series of ‘period’ rooms, kept aliveand stimulated an imaginative interest inthe history of France and its associatedartefacts. The many tombs, with their gisants,or recumbent figures, were among the relicswhich spoke most directly to the visitors tothe museum, among whom were a number ofartists. One was the painter Fleury Richard, apupil of David, and one of the best-known ofthe little group known as the ‘Troubadours’on account of their interest in subjects frommedieval history, particularly in its morepoetic and intimate aspects.Richard’s painting of Valentine de

Milan, shown at the 1802 Salon (and nowin St Petersburg), depicting a young widowmourning the death of her husband, the ducd’Orléans, was inspired by the contemplationof their tombs in Lenoir’s museum. Thepainting itself became, in turn, a source forother artists. The present painting combinesa debt to Richard’s painting with detailsderived directly from Lenoir’s museum:the tomb is a somewhat eclectic mix ofidentifiable sculpture, but the appearanceand costume of this young widow recall,unmistakeably (as Alain Pougetoux hasnoted¹), that of Valentine de Milan herself.Valentine’s known concern for the educationof her young son, the future poet Charles

d’Orléans, must have made her seem asuitable model for the lesser-known figureof Jeanne de Navarre, who features inHenriette Lorimier’s painting. Although theyoung widow was shortly to leave her chil-dren in the care of the duc de Bourgogne,when she herself became the second wifeof Henry IV of England, her future destinyhas, of course, no place in this work. Instead,the painter concentrates on a mother’s griefat losing her husband, and on her devotionto his son, in a medieval variant on thetheme of the widowed mother, famouslyrepresented in classical guise in David’sAndromache grieving over Hector. It wasHenriette Lorimier’s only work of this kind.She may have intended a contemporaryreference to the dynastic hopes at that timeresting in the children of Napoleon’s brother,Louis Bonaparte, whose wife, Hortense deBeauharnais, was the daughter (from herfirst marriage) of the picture’s first owner,Empress Josephine.The careful depiction of costume and

setting (though the young Arthur’s costumeis an anachronism), the expression ofmingled grief and devotion, and finelypainted finish, as well as its large size –unusual for a picture of this kind –makeclear, as François Pupil has emphasised,the link between this earlier generation ofTroubadour artists and the work of PaulDelaroche. LW

1. Pougetoux 1994, p. 54. For further discussion,see also Chaudonneret 1980, p. 29; Pupil 1985,p. 490, Pougetoux 1995, pp. 47–51 and Denton 1998,pp. 219–46.

Delaroche 9.indd 46Delaroche 9.indd 46 16/12/2009 09:4116/12/2009 09:41 Delaroche 9.indd 47Delaroche 9.indd 47 15/12/2009 16:0715/12/2009 16:07


CHARLES-MARIE BOUTON(1781–1853)

[6] The Fourteenth-Century Roomin the Musée des Monuments Français,1817Oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cmMusée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse (982.156)

Provenance: Acquired from Galerie Didier Aaron& Cie, Paris, 1982.

Bouton, a pupil of David, first exhibitedat the Salon in 1810 with a view of asubterranean chapel at St Denis, a picturenow untraced, but no doubt inspiredby the destruction of the early years ofthe Revolution, when numerous tombswere removed from that great church. In1812, in a logical progression, he sent in aPhilosopher meditating beside the Tombs in

the Thirteenth-Century Room at the Musée des

Petits-Augustins (this was Lenoir’s Musée desmonuments français). He continued to takethe museum as subject, and to emphasisethe force of its ‘period’ evocations, sendingin 1814 a View of the Fifteenth-Century Room,and finally, in 1817, a year aFer the closureof the museum (and perhaps, as Marie-Claude Chaudonneret has suggested, as afinal tribute to it 1), the Fourteenth-CenturyRoom. This is probably the second of twoversions of this final view; the first (MuséeCarnavalet, Paris) differs in representingonly a single visitor taking notes.The tombs of Charles V and Jeanne de

Bourbon are visible to the right, placed ona base made up of wood panelling from theSainte Chapelle; to the leF, in a series ofarches from Saint Denis, Lenoir had placed,upright, a set of formerly recumbent figuresfrom tombs taken from Saint Denis andvarious Paris convents. In such a setting itis tempting to recall, with Marie-ClaudeChaudonneret, the words of the historianJules Michelet, remembering his childhoodvisits to the museum: ‘What was I lookingfor? I hardly know – the life of the time,no doubt, and the spirit of the ages. I wasnot altogether certain that they were notalive, all those marble sleepers.’ For Bouton,the ‘life of the time’ here takes form as theunhappy king Charles VI, subject to fitsof madness, who broods at the tomb of hisfather, while his sister-in-law, Valentine de

Milan, keeps curious onlookers at a distance.This is anachronistic only if we do not

interpret the scene as theatre: Charles VIwas to appear and reappear as a subject,not only in historical accounts (notably inProsper de Barante’s Histoire des ducs deBourgogne) but, in a period drawn to themesof madness, in the theatre and in opera too.Bouton himself shortly aFerwards enteredinto partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, at this time still a theatredesigner, to set up the Diorama, thus takingto its logical conclusion the power of lightand architecture to reconstitute the past asdramatic experience. LW

1. Chaudonneret 1983, p.413.



PAUL DELAROCHE (1797–1856)

[14] The Princes in the Tower(Les Enfants d’Édouard), 1830Oil on canvas, 181 x 215 cmMusée du Louvre, Paris (Inv.3834)

Provenance: acquired by the French state from theSalon of 1831 for 6,000 francs and exhibited at theMusée du Luxembourg; transferred to the Louvrein 1874.

In the catalogue of Delaroche’s workpublished aFer his death it was noted: ‘Ingeneral […] Paul Delaroche began hispictures in proportions or in forms that weredifferent from their definitive forms andproportions.’¹ This observation, made withregard to his Death of Elizabeth, applies inparticular to the studies leading up to ThePrinces in the Tower, and the two versionsof the picture that were painted. Delarochewas certainly familiar with the scene fromShakespeare’s Richard III that had beenstrikingly portrayed by Sir Joshua Reynolds’pupil, James Northcote, in 1790, and wasreproduced in Francis Legat’s engraving forthe Shakespeare Gallery. The recent revela-tion of his visit to England in 1822makesit possible that he saw the original work,and may have met its author, who speciallyprized this evocation of ‘the murder of twoinnocent children’.² On his subsequent visitof 1827, one of Delaroche’s priorities was todiscover the historical context of this episodefrom English history. As was later explainedin the Illustrated London News: ‘The costumeof the Princes, the bedstead, and its draper-ies, were carved and made in England, fromthe best authorities, under the supervision ofDelaroche who came expressly to London tovisit the scene of his picture.’³In contrast to Northcote, who con-

veyed little of the context, Delaroche was

determined to give some authenticity to thechamber in the Tower of London where thetwo sons of Edward IV were imprisoned. Heconsulted visual documents from the period,such as the Annunciation by Rogier van derWeyden in the Louvre, from which he bor-rowed the detail of the hanging medallionon the back wall.4 In 1828, he plotted hiscomposition with the aid of small plasterfigures of the two princes, which remainedin the possession of his family 30 years later.5Throughout these preparations, however, hewas committed to a composition ‘en hauteur’– that is to say, taller than it was broad – asin Northcote. At what must have been a latestage in the creation of the work, he decidedto make a radical change in its proportions,and ‘had about 65 centimetres of canvassewn on at each side’.6The additional flanking pieces, which re-

main visible today, enabled him to transformthe composition. The leF-hand strip enabledhim to introduce the dramatic detail of thebarred door, with candle-light penetratingthrough a crack, and the small dog who de-tects the approach of the assassins. There is,however, a dearth of preliminary studies thatmight trace this change of plan. Two draw-ings in the Fogg Art Museum that have nowrightly been attributed to Delaroche do nothelp. As Louis-Antoine Prat has argued, theyappear to relate more closely to the secondversion of The Princes in the Tower, paintedfor the English collector John Naylor in1852.7 Yet Delaroche was clearly contem-plating a version akin to Naylor’s work asearly as 1831, when he produced the uniquelithograph of the two princes on their kneesbeside the bed.8 The Fogg drawings confirmthat possible variants were occurring toDelaroche at an early stage. But they do notindicate the transformation of the work bythe addition of the little dog and the door.

Here the drawings derived from Delaroche’sstudy of Henri III et sa cour, which focusattention on the open window to the leF, area better guide to the dynamic interpretationof pictorial space that was revealed in ThePrinces in the Tower (see cat. 50).Delaroche chose the models for the

two princes from among his friends andacquaintances. Reliable later testimonyindicates that the younger prince was mod-elled by the young sister of the artist Féliciede Fauveau, while the brooding Edward Vwas Henri Delaborde, future biographerof Ingres and secretary of the Académiedes Beaux-Arts, who was then beginning aperiod as Delaroche’s pupil and studio assis-tant.9 Among those who praised the paintingon its appearance at the 1831 Salon wasDelaroche’s former master, the Baron Gros,who reportedly exclaimed: ‘What expressionin these two children! What wit! What intel-ligence in the little dog who looks and listensso well!’¹0 SB

1. Delaborde and Goddé 1858, opp. plate 6.2. Bann 2006, pp.362–4.3. Quoted in Bann 1997, p.94.4. His intermediary drawing is reproduced in Bann1997, p. 101.5. Delaborde and Goddé 1858, opp. plate 14.6. Delaborde and Goddé 1858.7. Prat 1997, p.70. See Bann 2005, p. 30 for Naylor’scommission.8. Reproduced in Bann 1997, p.95.9. See Benoist 1994, p. 143, and Larroumet 1904, p. 125.10. Quoted in Bann 1997, p. 100.



FRANCIS LEGAT (1761–1809),AFTER JAMES NORTHCOTE(1746–1831)

[15] Shakespeare Gallery:King Richard III, Act IV, Scene III:

The Murder of the Princes, 1790Etching and engraving on paper, 56.5 x 41 cmThe British Museum, London (Dd.6.26*)

WILLIAM SKELTON (1763–1848),AFTER JAMES NORTHCOTE(1746–1831)

[16] Shakespeare Gallery:King Richard the Third, Act IV,

Scene III: The Burial of the Princes,1795Etching and engraving on paper, 56.5 x 41.4 cmThe British Museum, London (Ee.2.151)

ISAAC TAYLOR (1730–1807),AFTER THOMAS STOTHARD(1755–1834)

[17] Shakespeare Gallery:Henry VIII, Act I, Scene IV: Henry

VIII leading Anne Boleyn to the Dance,1798Etching and engraving on paper, 50.4 x 63.5 cmThe British Museum, London (Dd.6.27)

THOMAS RYDER (1746–1810),AFTER THOMAS STOTHARD(1755–1834)

[18] Shakespeare Gallery:Othello, Act II, Scene I: The Meeting of

Othello and Desdemona, 1799Stipple engraving on paper, 49.8 x 63 cmThe British Museum, London (1977.U.739)

John Boydell opened his ShakespeareGallery in Pall Mall in 1786, having com-missioned from Thomas Banks a sculpturalgroup representing Shakespeare between theDramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting– exactly representing his own ambition forthe Gallery. He was able to meet the greatexpense of his scheme from the proceedsof some thirty years of commercial success,during which he had also succeeded inestablishing a British school of engraversto rival the perfection of the French. It wasa success based largely on commissioningand selling reproductive prints; the mostfamously successful was William Woollett’sengraving aFer Benjamin West’s Deathof Wolfe, published in 1776. Not only didBoydell receive £15,000 for it, over 15 years,but he also established, with this celebratedprint, a precedent for the representationin the grand manner of a recent historicalevent.¹Preliminary discussions for the

Shakespeare Gallery began at a dinner partyin Hampstead, at the home of his nephew,Josiah Boydell, who was later to become abusiness partner. At home in Cheapside,among Boydell’s own pictures, hung JamesNorthcote’s The Murder of the Princes in theTower, from Richard III. Northcote laterclaimed this as the origin of the scheme,though other artists, including Romney andFuseli, also claimed to have thought of theidea (Fuseli while lying on his back lookingat the Sistine Chapel ceiling).The essence of the scheme was the

publication of a series of large plates illus-trating the plays of Shakespeare, and asmaller series planned to accompany anedition of the plays; some two hundredprints in all. Boydell commissioned thepaintings from which these were made;they hung in the Shakespeare Gallery,

together with other contemporary worksfrom his own collection, but the engrav-ings themselves were at the heart of it. Theengravers, indeed, were oFen paid morethan the painters, who included Sir JoshuaReynolds, Benjamin West and James Barry,as well as a number of artists better knownas illustrators. The whole enterprise invitedboth keen interest and criticism; CharlesLamb famously complained: ‘What injurydid not Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallerydo me with Shakespeare. To have Opie’sShakespeare, Northcote’s Shakespeare,light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare, deaf-headedReynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my andeverybody’s Shakespeare’ – perhaps notunlike the response to the film of a favouritebook. However, it was not criticism of thiskind, but the war with France which led tothe ultimate failure of the gallery, ending inBoydell’s near-bankruptcy in 1804.The last quarter of the eighteenth cen-

tury saw the rise of a marked enthusiasm forShakespeare, stemming in part from the act-ing of Mrs Siddons and David Garrick, andstimulated by Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubileeat Stratford in 1769. Various illustrated edi-tions appeared, as well as books of plates.Boydell’s, however, was on a different scale,as he describes it in his Preface: it was for art-ists ‘to carry into execution an undertaking,where the national honour, the advancementof the Arts, and their own advantage, areequally concerned’.Though some of the artists involved

occasionally used actors to model the prin-cipal parts, the compositions themselveswere not based on theatrical performance;many, indeed, are set in landscapes of a kindalmost impossible to present in a theatre.Not surprisingly, perhaps, for a schemeaiming at ‘the advancement of the Arts’, and


1615




[23] Cromwell and Charles I(Cromwell découvrant le cercueil de

Charles Ier), 1831Oil on canvas, 230 x 300 cmFonds national d’art contemporain (Cnap), Ministèrede la culture et de la communication, Paris, Fnac PFH– 2803. On long-term loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes.

Provenance: 1830, state commission (5,000 francs),allocated to the Nîmes museum in 1834.

Delaroche’s Cromwell and Charles I arrivedlate at the 1831 Salon, where his Princes inthe Tower was already on exhibition. Asthe critic Horace de Viel-Castel observed,the work ‘took the attention of the publicstraight away, [and they] were silent forhours on end, astonished by the deep andmelancholy ideas that this painting awak-ened in them’.¹ The scene showed OliverCromwell viewing the body of Charles I,King of England, aFer his execution byorder of the Parliament on 30 January 1649.But it struck home in France as providinga directly contemporary lesson. Frenchwriters like Châteaubriand and the historianFrançois Guizot accustomed the Frenchpublic to thinking of the English Civil Waras a forerunner of their own Revolution.Here was a powerful visual symbol thatexposed the historical predicament in whichthe French nation was still involved, lessthan a year aFer the July Revolution of 1830had forced the exile of the elder branchof the Bourbon dynasty. As Viel-Castelexclaimed: ‘It is at a period like our own, ina century when the destinies of kings havebeen found to weigh little in the scales of thegreat interests of the people that the pictureof Cromwell arrives, and strikes us with allits high morality.’

Yet the fact that the work was com-missioned by the state before the JulyRevolution indicates that Delaroche couldnot have anticipated this fortuitous timing.It was later claimed that the decision tosend the painting to Nîmes could be tracedto the Duchesse de Berry, mother of theBourbon heir to the throne, who had earlieracquired his Saint Vincent de Paul (cat. 10).²But by 1831 the Duchesse de Berry was inexile, and it is more likely that the destina-tion of the work was secured by Guizot, whoheld high office in the new government ofLouis-Philippe.³ Guizot was born in Nîmes,and would have been mindful of the extremesuffering of the city during the Revolution.Once it was hung in the city museum (thenlodged in the Roman temple known asthe Maison Carrée), the citizens of Nîmesbecame deeply attached to the work. Theyrefused to permit it to make the journey toParis for the Delaroche retrospective in 1857.If Cromwell held a special message for

the French and for the Nîmois in particular,it was also the painting that establishedDelaroche’s reputation in Europe as awhole. The German poet Heinrich Heinewrote a lengthy criticism in which he hailedthe artist as the ‘choir-leader’ of the newFrench school of historical painting, andmemorably characterised the depictionof Cromwell: ‘There he stands, a form asfirm as earth, “brutal as fact”, powerfulwithout pathos, naturally supernatural,marvellously commonplace, outlawed andyet famous, beholding his work almost likea woodman who has just felled an oak.’4Delaroche responded to this general acclaimby arranging for the young printmaker LouisHenriquel-Dupont to engrave an aquatint,which was shown at the 1833 Salon. Eventhe reduced version of the work whichDelaroche painted as an aid to Henriquel’s

reproduction found an honoured place in thenascent collection of the city of Hamburg.Cromwell was also recreated as an authorisedfull-scale replica by Delaroche’s favoured ex-pupil Charles Jalabert, which was exhibitedat the Royal Academy in London in 1850.Towards the end of his life, Delaroche

looked back on the work as a touchstone ofthe new approach that he had brought tothe rendering of historical subjects. ‘At thetime of my Cromwell,’ he claimed, ‘peoplereproached me for making it too true, andnow this figure has become the type foranyone wishing to represent him, either inthe theatre, or in sculpture, even in England,where they are proud of this big hypocrite.’5By this time, the painterly qualities ofCromwell were also appreciated. CharlesBlanc wrote that ‘to find a costume drawnwith more facility, better modelled in itssurfaces, better detailed in its folds, in factrendered with a brush that is freer, moreflexible and at the same time firmer, onemust go back as far as Van Dyck’.6 SB

1. Viel-Castel 1831, p.269.2. Gillet 1934, p.257.3. Guizot owned a drawing for Cromwell, with apersonal dedication by Delaroche, which is now in theMusée Tavet-Delacour, Pontoise.4. Heine (no date), p.81.5. Quoted in Bann 1997, pp. 106–7.6. Quoted in Nantes and Montpellier 1999, p.289.




[29] Study after François Clouet(about 1516–1572), Portrait of

Charles IX, 1830sGraphite on paper, 11 x 8.5 cmPrivate collection

Provenance: formerly Delaroche-Vernet Collection.

[30] Boy in Costume relating toYounger Prince in the play Les Enfants

d’Edouard, about 1832Graphite with body colour on paper, 28.6 x 23 cmCollections de la Comédie-Française, Paris (MC.ENF.1833 [H1 Bis])

Provenance: design for a Comédie-Françaiseproduction

Of Delaroche’s interest in the theatre, espe-cially in the period from 1829 onwards, therecan be no doubt. It is oFen asserted that hedesigned costumes for the theatre and theopera during this period. But AlexandreDumas fails to confirm the tradition thatDelaroche was involved in the costumesfor Dumas’s play Henri III et sa cour (1829),although there is clear evidence that he drewupon the last act for his own compositionalstudies (cat. 50). Dumas does, however,assert that Delaroche was the designer forCasimir Delavigne’sMarino Faliero later inthe same year, and pokes fun at the rumourthat he tried to ‘get the movement of thewind’ into his costumes.¹ Though there isevery possibility that Delaroche did col-laborate with his friend Delavigne, the printsdepicting the costumes do not disclosewhether he realised this ambition!Delaroche did undoubtedly make auto-

graph sketches aFer historic portraits,and these might have served for costumedesigns. His rapid study aFer François

Clouet’s full-length portrait of the Frenchking Charles IX (Musée du Louvre, Paris)could have been made in the process ofcollecting details of period dress for thefirst production of Meyerbeer’s operaLes Huguenots in 1836. Charles IX was themonarch in whose reign the slaughter ofthe Huguenots known as the Massacre ofSaint Bartholomew’s Day took place in 1572.Delaroche’s interest in being associated withthis opera is easy to understand, given hisview that post-revolutionary France was stillsuffering from the long-term effects of thatdivisive outbreak of religious intolerance.But once again there appears to be no con-vincing visual evidence of his involvement.This is partly a consequence of the types

of visual documentation that have survived.Theatre costumes were put on record aFerthe event in print collections such as theGalerie dramatique of Martinet (cat. 55). Inthe case of the Comédie-Française, thereare also surviving sets of the actual designsused for the production of costumes. IndeedDelavigne’s Les Enfants d’Edouard is one ofthe first plays for which such an extensivevisual record – accompanied by a contem-porary inventory of the costumes – remainsextant. But the set of costume studies inquestion is not from Delaroche’s own hand.By this time, he was delegating duties topupils. Gustave Larroumet explicitly states:‘In Delaroche’s studio, the pupil most fondof the theatre and the most knowledgeableabout history [was] Henri Delaborde. It[was] he who, under the master’s direction,designed the costumes for [Delavigne’s]Louis XI and the Enfants d’Edouard.’²In this context, Olivia Voisin’s discovery

of a drawing in the dossier of Les Enfantsd’Édouard is significant. It relates broadlyto the costume that Richard, Duke of Yorkwears in the early acts of the play, not

omitting the dagger that he half-drawsimpulsively in Act I, Scene 9 (see cat. 33).A version of the striking plumed hat, whichdoes not feature in Alexandre Lacauchie’slater costume prints of the Duke of York(cats. 33, 34), does, in fact, make its appear-ance in Maleuvre’s contemporary print ofthe costume for Martinet’s Galerie théâtrale.Though debatable as an authentic periodfeature, this can be related to the fashionfor plumed hats that developed aFer theirspectacular display on the heralds assistingat the Coronation of Charles X in 1827.³This drawing is clearly not a conventionalcostume design, but a posed portrait incostume, possibly involving the youngDelaborde, who had already modelled theelder prince for Delaroche’s painting. Thequality and style of the drawing suggestthat it was sketched by Delaroche himself.Presumably it was passed on to the theatrefor reference in the devising of Anaïs’s firstcostume. SB

1. Dumas 1966, pp. 107–8.2. Larroumet 1904, p. 126.3. See the reference to the fashion in Hugo 2009,vol.2, p. 89. Such plumed hats can be seen in Lami’slithographs of several of the participants in theDuchesse de Berry’s Ball (1829). A portrait of anunnamed woman, signed and dated by Delaroche in1829, features another fine example.


29

30



RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON(1802–1828)

[39] Amy Robsart and the Earl ofLeicester, about 1827Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cmAshmolean Museum, Oxford (WA 1933.3)

Provenance: Alexander Hamilton Douglas, 10thDuke of Hamilton, and by descent to the Beckfordcollection; sold Christie’s, London, 6 November 1919,lot 109 (as The Declaration); bought by Colnaghi; soldChristie’s, London, 31 July 1925, lot 31; bought byGooden & Fox (for Mrs W.F.R. Weldon); presented byMrs W.F.R. Weldon in 1933.

The picture received its present title only in1937, but may represent, as then suggested,the scene from Sir Walter Scott’s novelKenilworth in which Amy Robsart urges herhusband Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, toend the secrecy surrounding their marriage,a secrecy which he, as a favourite of QueenElizabeth, wishes to maintain. The scenemay relate to a moment at the beginning ofChapter 7 describing the arrival of Leicesteron one of his occasional visits to AmyRobsart at Cumnor:Meanwhile the Earl, for he was of no inferior

rank, returned his lady’s caresses with the most

affectionate ardour but affected to resist when

she strove to take his cloak from him.

“Nay”, she said “but I will unmantle you. I

must see if you have kept your word to me, and

come as the great Earl men call thee, and not as

heretofore like a private cavalier.”Scott lays particular emphasis, in the

course of the novel, on the richness of Amy’sdress and the dazzling brilliance of herapartments at Cumnor; the kind of bril-liance Bonington took particular delight inevoking in paint, as he does here. For AmyRobsart, however, it served only to heightenthe irony of her permanent isolation fromthe court.

There is a lithograph with a similarcomposition in Bonington’s album Cahier desix sujets, published in 1826. Like the composi-tion of Quentin Durward, therefore, this workhas some affinities with the picturesqueimagery circulating within print albums inthe 1820s; Nodier’s publication, the Voyagespittoresques (see cats. 7–9) was a magisterialversion of such an enterprise. The costumeshere look French rather than English;Bonington, like Delaroche (cat. 4), madesketches aFer Clouet’s Henri II, and hisCharles IX, both in the Louvre,¹ and appar-ently made use of Charles IX for the figure ofLeicester. In 1827 Delacroix began to designthe costumes for Victor Hugo’s Amy Robsart(it opened in 1828, but ran for only one night).The present painting is not dated, but sinceBonington and Delacroix were close friends,and as it is probable that it dates from thesame period, we may suppose that theydiscussed together the scenes of the play. AsPatrick Noon has observed, Bonington hasdrawn on several antiquarian sources fordetails of costume, in addition to his studiesaFer Clouet, showing the same concern forauthentic period costume which character-ised theatrical productions in the late 1820s²and, indeed, the preparation of costumesfor the Quadrille de Marie Stuart (cat. 38).As Henri Duponchel commented, the mosthistorically accurate of all the costumes atthe Duchesse de Berry’s ball was that worn bythe Duc de Richelieu; describing the sumptu-ous details, he wrote ‘comme on en peut voirdans le portrait de Charles IX par Clouet’.³Though Bonington’s picture recalls certainfeatures of ‘Troubadour’ painting, and showsa concern for the details of period costume,it also derives much from the artists he andDelacroix both admired – Rubens, Titian andWatteau – and from what Delacroix called‘the aFernoon light of Veronese’. LW

1. Illustrated in Nottingham 2002, p.69, no. 111.Both are reduced versions, painted in the studio ofFrançois Clouet. The original life-size portrait ofHenry II is in the Palazzo Pitti, in Florence, and thatof Charles IX in Vienna.2.Mr Michael Venator has brought two related im-ages to my attention: a lithograph by Fontenay fromthis period, showing an actor in a costume which ex-actly recalls the Clouet portrait, as sketched by bothDelaroche and Bonington,and a figure in a water-colour by Delacroix in the Louvre (RF 10639), whichclosely resembles the others, and may represent acharacter from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, for whichDelaroche may have designed costumes.3. Duponchel 1829, pp.249–50.




[53] The Execution ofLady Jane Grey, 1833Oil on canvas, double-lined, 251 x 302 cmThe National Gallery, London (NG1909)Signed and dated lower right: Paul DelaRoche / 1833.Frame inscription: L’EXECVTION DE / LADY JANEGREY / EN LA TOVR DE / LONDRES L’AN 1554’

Provenance: 1833, bought by Count AnatoleDemidoff (1812/13–1870) for FF 8,000; 4March 1870,sold at Demidoff sale to John Heugh; 24 April 1874,Christie’s, bought by Agnew’s; 11 July 1874, boughtby A.G. Kurz; Kurz sale, 9–11May 1891, Christie’s,bought Agnew’s; sold to the 1st Lord Cheylesmore, 7May 1892, No. 78; bequeathed to the National Gallery,16 December 1902, by the 2nd Lord Cheylesmore;transferred to the Tate Gallery (then NationalGallery, Millbank), 18 December 1902; 1928, damagedin the Thames flood; 1958, declared a total loss¹; 1973,rediscovered at Tate and transferred to the NationalGallery, London.

This huge but finely wrought painting is oneof the best examples of the historical dramasthat made Delaroche more popular in hislifetime than his contemporaries Ingres orDelacroix. The Execution of Lady Jane Greyshows the young great-granddaughter ofHenry VII, who, following the death ofEdward VI in 1553, reigned for nine daysas queen. Deposed by the supporters ofthe Catholic Queen Mary, she was triedfor treason and beheaded at Tower Hill on12 February 1554.Delaroche shows the instant when the

victim, blindfolded and stripped to herpetticoat, is guided to the block by Sir JohnBrydges, Lieutenant of the Tower. Overcomewith emotion, two of her ladies-in-waitinglean against a pillar to the leF. The execu-tioner stands aside with rope and dagger,resting on the handle of his axe; at the back,the tips of guards’ halberds can just be seenbeyond the black scaffold.With its echoes of the death of Queen

Marie-Antoinette 40 years earlier, the storyof Lady Jane Grey’s fate carried real histori-cal significance. A preparatory drawing forthe painting (cat. 66) includes a vignettefor a different, subsequently abandonedcomposition clearly annotated ‘La Dauphineet L[ouis] 17 au temple’. The juxtapositionof the two scenes on the same sheet supportsthe parallel between the fate of Lady JaneGrey and that of the French royal familycondemned to the guillotine. An oFen-drawnanalogy between the French and Englishrevolutions had revived an interest in lesser-known English historical figures. The bur-geoning Anglomania of the time resulted inan appetite for paintings of ill-fated Englishroyalty. Louis XVII of France and Edward Vof England were innocent child victims whodied because of political circumstances; sowas Lady Jane Grey.As Stephen Bann suggests (cat. 66),

Delaroche may not have initially plannedto represent Lady Jane Grey, but probablytoyed with the idea of depicting anotherdoomed English royal. Jane Grey was hardlya newcomer to the Salon; there were at leastfour occurrences of the subject in the twodecades preceding Delaroche’s showingin 1834.² Yet her story, arguably still little-known in France, was only familiar to thecognoscenti, and the subject may not havebeen popular with the public. To allow view-ers a full grasp of the painting, Delarocheensured the facts were set out in the Salonlivret with a few lines of explanation: ‘JaneGrey, whom Edward VI had, through hiswill, appointed heir to the English throne,was, aFer a nine-days long reign, impris-oned by order of her cousin Mary, who, sixmonths later, had her beheaded. Jane Greywas executed deep in the Tower of London,aged seventeen, on 12 February 1554.’ Thisbackground information precedes a vivid

description of the scene taken from theMartyrologe des Protestans, dated 1588.The story of Lady Jane Grey had been

recounted in historical literature, with ac-counts of her life in all histories of England.In France, Madame de Staël had turned theNine Days’ Queen’s life into drama with hereponymous play,³ and N.H. Nicholas’s LiteraryRemains of Lady Jane Grey had just been trans-lated into French.⁴ Delaroche’s factual sourc-es for the painting may have been influencedby such literary reminiscences, but historicalaccuracy was his main goal. He could haveopted for a romanticised version of Lady JaneGrey’s last moments as the foundation forhis painting, but instead, for the sake of ac-curacy, favoured a sixteenth-century accountof the execution, then believed as historicallyreliable, however dry and obscure.⁵Delaroche’s historical reconstitutions

had to be plausible, and the making of hispaintings was preceded by extensive research.Endowed with a curious mind and an aware-ness of visual culture, he had amassed alot of material which he was able to formand synthesise. The study of Lady Jane Greyreveals that Delaroche’s visual repertoirefor the painting was varied; a compromisebetween various English sources, Troubadourformulae (see p. 26), and motifs from bothreligious art and Davidian painting. Thesewere acquired through visiting galleries andexhibitions or siFing through publications orprint portfolios. Delaroche came to Londonin 1827 ‘expressly to visit the scene of hispicture’⁶ of the young princes, and researcheddetails of the Tower which could have beenused for cat. 53.⁷ He probably would haveencountered Charles Robert Leslie’s LadyJane Grey prevailed on to Accept the Crown, thenon display;⁸ the young queen’s dazzling whitedress and delicate hand gesture may havestayed in his memory.




[54] Strafford on his Way toExecution, 1835Oil on canvas, 249 x 310 cmPrivate collection

Provenance: bought by the Duke of Sutherland andhis brother Lord Francis Egerton from the artist;bought by John Francis Queeny of St Louis, Missourifrom the Duke of Sutherland’s sale in 1913; privatecollection.

ACHILLE MARTINET (1806–1877),AFTER PAUL DELAROCHE(1797–1856)

[55] Charles I insulted by the Soldiersof Cromwell, 1842Engraving on paper, 43 x 53.2 cmPrivate collection

On 8 January 1836, the Duke of Sutherlandwrote to his mother: ‘We saw on Mondayone of the finest modern pictures I eversaw – it is by P. de la Roche [sic] andthe subject is Ld. Strafford Going to HisExecution – he says that the picture he hasto do for F[rancis] of K. Charles I will beas good.’¹ The purchase of these two majorworks by the two brothers who owned thefinest private collection of paintings inBritain at the time was a significant step inestablishing Delaroche’s reputation beyondFrance. Evidently Charles I was little morethan a promissory note by this date, thoughLord Francis Egerton had been sufficientlyimpressed by Delaroche’s assurances to re-serve it in advance. He may well have seen apreliminary sketch, in which the broad linesof the composition are established.² Straffordon his Way to Execution, however, was alreadyon show in the studio. Though no indicationof ownership was given when the two workswere exhibited at the 1837 Salon, it may beassumed that by then both were destined forthe Sutherland family.The genesis of Strafford reflects

Delaroche’s long-standing interest in thepersonal dramas of some of the unfortunatevictims of early modern English history.But it also reveals the greater freedom forhis talents when he became Professor andmaster of a studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts late in 1833. Jules Goddé notes that ‘thispicture was completely sketched out in 1834by M. Henri Delaborde, aFer a watercoloursketch that belonged to M. le vicomte de laVillestreux, and a wax maquette executedby Paul Delaroche, who only took the pic-ture up again in the summer of 1835, onhis return from Italy’.³ Having finishedThe Execution of Lady Jane Grey by the endof 1833, Delaroche had turned to anotherEnglish historical subject which he would

make distinctively his own. The executionof the main counsellor of Charles I in 1641was familiar to the many French readerswho had studied the history of the Stuartdynasty. But the striking reference toStrafford’s unjust fate in Alfred de Vigny’snovel Cinq-Mars (where Delaroche found thematerial for his Richelieu of 1829) might alsohave resonated in his mind.4As with The Princes in the Tower,

Delaroche made a maquette for the work,which is now lost. The ‘watercolour sketch’mentioned by Goddé could well be the studynow in a private collection.5 Goddé revealsthat the soldier at the extreme right, who isnot present in this sketch, was modelled byGeneral Pierre Boyer (1772–1851), a veteranof Napoleon’s army who was currentlyInspecteur-général of the French gendarmerieand an amateur painter. Aside from thiscontemporary link, Delaroche remainedmindful of his sources in English historicalprints. James Northcote’s Tower of London,engraved by William Skelton, had shownthe bodies of the two Princes in the Towerbeing conveyed down a flight of steps (p. 67,cat. 16). Delaroche would have had this inmind when he sketched a possible sequel toThe Execution of Lady Jane Grey in which thecoffin of the young woman is brought downthe stairs of the Tower, with the Lieutenantleading the procession.6 In Strafford, thesense of arrested downward movement givesthe bowed figure of the victim an addedpoignancy. The blessing of ArchbishopLaud, Strafford’s fellow prisoner in theTower, is delivered through an iron grille,a motif that Delaroche has converted fromVictor Schnetz’s Farewell of Consul Boethius tohis family, shown at the Salon of 1827 (Muséedes Augustins, Toulouse).The degree to which Delaroche’s deci-

sion to embark on Charles I was influenced


54





by the interest of Lord Francis Egertonis hard to assess. He may well have hadpreliminary drawings to show his futurepatron, since one is still held by the Louvre.7Linda Whiteley has found that, before 1830,there was a drawing in the collection ofLouis-Auguste Coutan. While the centredcomposition is a departure from the dy-namic cross-movement of Strafford, it recallsthe poignant contrast between an impas-sive victim and an aggressive crowd thatDelaroche had explored in Death of PresidentDuranti (1827, now destroyed). His vignetteof Joan of Arc, engraved by Thompson forthe illustrated edition of Barante’s Histoiredes Ducs de Bourgogne (1837), depends on

a similar opposition, andMarie-Antoinettebefore the Tribunal (cat. 59) offers a lateexample. Among contemporary critics,Heinrich Heine was not alone in noting thatthe composition resembled a tavern scenein the manner of Jan Steen, though (in hisjudgement) Delaroche had not lived up tothe aspiration to be a ‘graceful and elegantDutchman’.8 The painting hung for manyyears in the dining room of BridgewaterHouse, but has not been visible sinceundergoing bomb damage in the SecondWorld War (see p. 22). Its present restora-tion promises to bring back into public viewthe last of Delaroche’s major paintings onEnglish historical themes.

Aware of the disasters that couldovercome unique paintings, Delarochetook great care to secure fine engravingsof his work. For both Strafford and CharlesI, he reserved his reproduction rights. Themeticulous print by future academicianAchille Martinet was published in 1842 by hisdealer Goupil. SB

1. Quoted in Ward-Jackson 1985, p. 147.2.Musée du Louvre, Département des ArtsGraphiques (RF 35067).3. Delaborde and Goddé 1858, plate 19.4. See Bann 1997, pp. 146–7. Vigny pictures Richelieuhearing of the death of Strafford and musing on theinequity with which selfless service to an absolutemonarch is rewarded.5. Illustrated in Bann 1997, p. 148.6.Musée du Louvre, Département des ArtsGraphiques (RF 35136).7.Musée du Louvre, Département des ArtsGraphiques(RF 35067).8. Quoted in Bann 1997, p. 152.

55




[60] Young Christian Martyr(La Jeune Martyre), 1854–5Oil on canvas, 170.5 x 148 cmMusée du Louvre, Paris (RF 1038)

Provenance: Bought by Adolphe Goupil (15,000francs) for reproduction, 1855; sold to Baron Adolphed’Eichtal (36,000 francs), 1857; given to the Louvreby the three children of d’Eichtal in memory of theirfather, 1895.

The largest painting produced by Delarocheduring his final years, the Young ChristianMartyr is also a summation of the theme offemale victimhood that was broached in TheExecution of Lady Jane Grey. The drawingsfrom the story of Saint Perpetua (see fig. 18,p. 44) indicate that he gave considerationto the legends of the early Roman martyrs,probably on his visit to Rome in 1843–4. Amore contemporary source for the memo-rable composition might be John EverettMillais’s Ophelia, which was shown at theRoyal Academy in 1852 and travelled to theParis Exposition Universelle in 1855. ButElisabeth Foucart-Walter is right in ques-tioning the usefulness of this comparison.¹For the contemporary critic ThéophileGautier, the work came as little less than arevelation. AFer seeing this ‘last paintingof Paul Delaroche’ in the Goupil Galleryearly in 1857, he made ample amends for thescathing comments he had made on earlyworks such as the Lady Jane Grey sometwenty years before. Praising the ‘tender,vaporous, hazy’ effect, reminiscent of theItalian Renaissance painter Correggio, heconcluded: ‘If [Delaroche] could count eightor ten figures like that one in his work, [he]would [have] nothing to fear from the com-petition of the greatest masters.’²How Delaroche came to paint this

anonymous martyr from ‘the time of [theRoman Emperor] Diocletian’³ is minutelydescribed in a contemporary article. Thepicture was inspired by ‘a kind of dream’,which came to the artist while he was suf-fering from severe fever in December 1853.In a letter of January 1854, he pronouncedhimself well enough to start sketching themotif, first in a charcoal study, and thenon a ‘small white canvas’.4 This invaluableletter expands on Delaroche’s conception ofthe theme. The young Roman woman, whorefused to sacrifice to the ‘false gods’, hasbeen condemned to death and cast into theTiber with her hands bound. ‘[T]he sun hasset behind the sombre and bare banks of theriver; two Christians, who are going silentlyon their way, notice the corpse of the youngmartyr which passes in front of them, car-ried by the waters.’5This may well be the fullest commentary

on the genesis and theme of a painting thatDelaroche ever wrote. Yet a comparison ofthe different extant versions of the workreveals a number of problems in followingits gestation. The initial charcoal study hasprobably disappeared, though there areseveral related pencil studies, mostly for thefigure with bound hands, in the Louvre col-lection (RF 34811, 34812, 34813, 34817, 34819).Delaroche’s ‘small canvas’, probably thepainting sold in 1857 as the ‘first thought’ ofthe composition, cannot be traced either.6However, the painting in the Louvre is with-out any doubt the work seen by Gautier in1857, before it was sold to Baron d’Eichtal. Anote in the sale catalogue of June 1857 con-firms that Goupil owned it, and reserved therights of reproduction. The steel engraving,by Herman Eichens, duly appeared in 1861.Nonetheless, a work on such a scale was cer-tainly not painted for the exclusive purposeof being reproduced, as were several of the

small versions of Delaroche’s major paintingsthat had previously leF his studio. The sizeand the quality of the Louvre work implythat, though unsigned, Delaroche consideredit as the definitive version. Its appearance in aprominent position in Louis Roux’s retrospec-tive painting of the studio (1858) supports thisinference (fig. 35, p. 156).This recognition affects the status of the

other existing versions of the Young Martyr.There is no difficulty in authenticating thework ‘begun by Delaroche but completedby [Charles] Jalabert’ in the Walters ArtMuseum, Baltimore. Jalabert was one ofDelaroche’s most faithful pupils, and oFenworked in his studios at Paris and Nice.Moreover the Goupil account books recordits sale in 1868.7 But the fine version in theHermitage poses a problem. Evidently bothsigned and dated, it cannot date from 1853, aspreviously recorded.8 There can be no reasonto reject Delaroche’s own clear account ofthe work having been begun early in 1854.Measuring 73.5 x 60 cm, the Hermitage ver-sion is larger than the ‘first thought’ canvas(33 x 25 cm) and the Eichens engraving(65.2 x 53 cm), but less than half the size ofthe Louvre version. It does not appear tohave passed through Goupil’s books. If weare to trust the autograph, it might have beenpainted to give to a friend in 1854/5. SB

1. Foucart-Walter in Nantes and Montpellier 1999,pp.326–7.2. Gautier 1857, p. 146.3. As described in Paris 1857b, p.3.4. Ulbach 1857, p. 368.5. Ulbach 1857, p. 369.6. Paris 1857b, p.5.7. Getty Research Institute, Goupil 3271, Book 4, p.52,row 9.8. See Ziff 1977, p. 302. A close inspection of the dateon the painting in fact reveals that the last digit isdifficult to interpret.



decision could well have been associatedwith his first prolonged meetings with MlleAnaïs, when she posed for her portrait as afashionable young actress. It is likely thatthese sittings took place in the latter monthsof 1832, since this period coincided with herelevation to a new status as a sociétaire ofthe Comédie-Française. Cat. 67 suggeststhat she then agreed to pose for the figure ofJane in a dress of sixteenth-century Frenchstyle. The tiny Baltimore drawing (fig. 17)that features the same period dress capturesa moment of repose for the sitter, whichthe artist has instilled with his own sense ofintimacy.The two letters despatched by Delaroche

to Anaïs (cat. 75) relate to a further impor-tant phase in the composition. The shorterof the two dates from the run of the play, LesEnfants d’Édouard, which opened on 18 May1833. The longer and more explicit lettercould well relate to the earlier months of1833, since there is a reference to Anaïs’s fire-side. It is argued elsewhere (p. 42) that thisletter was sent to arrange a sitting in Anaïs’s

apartment, with ‘Charles Guyot’ possiblymodelling the role of the Lieutenant of theTower. If this is so, cats. 68, 69 and 70 canall be related to this stage. Cats. 69, thoughvery similar to 68, has been squared up tofacilitate transfer of the motif to the largerscale of the painting. Cat. 70 is involvedwith the tricky foreshortening of Jane’soutstretched arms.To complete this timetable, there is une-

quivocal evidence that The Execution of LadyJane Grey was expected to appear at the1833 Salon, which opened on 1 March. Thecritic Théophile Gautier, writing in the samemonth, went so far as to accuse him of ‘co-quettishness with his Jane Grey so lauded inadvance’.4 Gautier was, however, expectingDelaroche to repeat his old trick of arrivinglate at the exhibition, and exciting populardemand, as had been the case with Cromwellin 1831. A further notice in a contemporaryjournal, dated 23 June, can only have re-kindled the suspense by revealing that thepainting was being ‘finished at this moment’– too late for the Salon – but had supposedly

been snapped up by Count Demidoff for theenormous sum of 20,000 francs.5An intriguing footnote to this schedule

exists in the form of another letter, whichwas briefly summarised in a late nineteenth-century catalogue of autographs, and which,in view of the preceding testimony, mustsurely have been assigned to the wrong year.According to this source, Delaroche wroteon 22 June 1832 to ‘Madame Wyatt’ that ‘thepresence of her daughter [was] indispensa-ble for him to complete his picture of JaneGrey’.6 If we assume that the date was infact 1833, the implications of the message arefascinating. It is possible that Delaroche’scorrespondent was the ‘Mme Wyatt, née deVivefay’ who exhibited at the 1831 Salon, andthat the daughter mentioned was the futureartist Emma-Cornélie Wyatt de Vivefaywho became a well-known copyist under theSecond Empire. Delaroche’s acquaintancewith the English artist Matthew Cotes Wyattis attested by the 1822 entry in the MeyrickVisitors Book (cat. 11). But even if there isno direct link between the French-born lady

69 70


artist and the dynasty of English architectsto which Matthew belonged, Delarochewould surely have recognised the rich Tudorconnotations of the name Wyatt. The poetSir Thomas Wyatt was imprisoned in theTower under suspicion of being the loverof Anne Boleyn, and his sister Anne Wyattwas the lady-in-waiting who accompaniedthe unfortunate victim to the scaffold, andreceived her last confidences. Delarocheclearly wanted the most prominent of hisgrieving attendants to be finely character-ised, with her upturned face entirely visible.It is tempting to imagine that Miss Wyatt didrespond to the letter, since her name fittedthe bill to perfection.At any rate, the remaining studies involv-

ing the executioner and the grieving ladies(cats. 71, 72) did not require the presence ofMlle Anaïs; they would have been completedat Delaroche’s studio in the rue des Marais StGermain. The lady-in-waiting with her faceto the wall is clearly foreshadowed in cat.66. But the detailed sketch of the lady withupturned face in cat. 71 may date back to asitting with the daughter of Mme Wyatt. Itsuggests some acquaintance with Tudor cos-tume, though for Jane Grey’s precise periodit is anachronistic. The distinctive head-dressmight derive from a print a�er Holbein’s ren-dering of the daughters of Sir Thomas More,and so would belong a generation earlier.The striking outfit of the executioner as itappears in the final painting allies Italianatefeatures (such as the red tights) with genu-ine period features such as the jaunty cap.The large sheet of variant drawings for thiscrucial figure (cat. 72) shows that a live malemodel was introduced, a�er the grosser,sword-bearing figure of the Whitworth studyhad been discarded. Delaroche took greatpains to define the meditative pose fromwhich he contemplates his task.

71



m] toitov utji nk c - yale university press · {] iw b w io ^z v[zp ivq z[ _j {h iw ok j oy iw vj...

Documents