Henri III
by BONINGTON, Richard Parkes, Oil on canvas, 54 x 64 cm
Bonington was Anglo-French; born in Nottingham, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and went on to exert a considerable influence on the course of French Romantic painting. Delacroix, a great admirer of his work and a close friend, once sketched with him in London, and after this visit they had briefly shared a Paris studio. Both Bonington and Delacroix had cultivated subjects from past history which they reconstructed with a romantic attention to sentimental detail and character. They were avid readers of Scott, Byron, Shakespeare and of less well remembered authors like Dumesnil, from whom Bonington took the subject of his Henri III.
This painting is a study of the foppish character of the last Valois king of France, revealing Bonington’s great affection for history and romance; he found the subject in a novel by Dumesnil published in 1825.