The Assassination of the duc de Guise, Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). 1832. Watercolour and bodycolour with some gum varnish on paper. 14.3 x 24.8 cm. Inv: P738. Photo credit: The Wallace Collection, London. Kindly made available by the gallery for research purposes on the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Unported) licence.
This is an early version of the well-known painting of 1834 (not watercolour, but oil on canvas), shown with great success at the Paris Salon of 1835, and now in the collection of the Musée Condé, Chantilly. Note that there is also a The duc de Guise (1550-88), was Henri de Lorraine, leader of the Catholic League: on 23 December 1588, he was assassinated by supporters of Henri III in the king’s own bedroom at the château de Blois. Here, Delaroche shows the king coming in to see the body.
In his review of Patricia Smyth's book on the artist (see bibliography), Laurent Bury writes that Delaroche has presented the subject "with all the accurate details expected from genre painting but without its harmonious arrangements," thus creating "the illusion of unmediated experience, the viewer witnessing the scene as it could have seen on a stage, or read in a chronicle rather than a moralising history book. And yet," Bury adds, "Delaroche did present Guise as a sort of Christian martyr, introducing a hidden meaning behind the apparent insignificance of his work." It was this kind of "hidden meaning" that distinguished Delaroche's work, and that appealed so much to the Victorians. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Bury, Laurent. Review of Patricia Smyth's Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle (Liverpool: Liverpool Universtiy Press, 2022)
The Assassination of the duc de Guise. Wallace Collection. Web. 4 March 2024.
Created 4 March 2024