Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey

Dates: 24 Feb 10 - 23 May 10
Categories: 1800-1900 (Impressionism, etc)
Address: Trafalgar Square London WC2 5DN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7747 2885 Website

The French Revolution cast a long shadow, darkest over France, but affecting all of Europe to varying degrees throughout the 19th century (and, in France, to the present day).

The French artist Paul Delaroche (1787-1856) belonged to that generation of Romantic history painters who looked back to the immediate past with nostalgia for the ancien régime and its plight.

Although he painted but two works directly concerned with the Revolution, Marie-Antoinette before the Tribunal, 1851, and The Girondins’ Last Farewell, 31 October 1793, 1856, his monarchist convictions led him to treat other scenes of usurpation and martyrdom from other periods of history and from English history as barely disguised comments on French history and politics.

This exhibition has at its centre the gallery’s own Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833, depicting the beheading of the first-cousin once removed of Edward VI (and Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, his sisters).

On Edward’s death in 1553, his Protestant supporters made an exiguous and tendentious claim for the staunchly Protestant Grey’s right to succession, a move that was nipped in the bud by the rightful claimant, Queen Mary, who immediately ordered Lady Jane’s death—a harsh sentence by our standards, but not unacceptable by early modern mores. Other canvases in the vein of noble losers include The Princes in the Tower, 1830, A Young Christian Martyr, 1854-55 (both loaned by the Louvre), and Strafford on His Way to Execution, 1835 (private collection).

In a separate gallery is Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers, 1836, which was badly damaged at Bridgewater House, London, during the Blitz.

With the support of its owner, the Duke of Sutherland, it has been partially restored and put on display for the first time in 70 years. D.L.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833