DELAROCHE, Paul

Already in 1840 Louis-Philippe had consented to the return of Napoleon’s body for a state burial in Les Invalides, thus officially incorporating him into French history. But with this continuing process of rehabilitation came a fresh appreciation of the great man’s vulnerable humanity. In 1848 Louis-Philippe’s favourite history painter, Paul Delaroche, painted his own account of Napoleon’s Saint Bernard crossing. Tired but determined, the guided mule plods on, a bedraggled Napoleon on its back. The contrast with Jacques-Louis David’s artifice is extreme, but Delaroche’s position was far from hostile. He was fascinated by Napoleon, to whom he bore a strong resemblance, and whose successes and reversals he compared to his own. In his view, the icon would not lose by being revealed as a credible man.

Two once famous pictures by Delaroche in the Wallace Collection illustrate the contrasting last days of the two great French Cardinals, Mazarin eager for wealth, Richelieu thirsting for revenge.

In 1837 Delaroche was given an important commission. It was to decorate the apse of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with a cycle of more than 70 of the most famous artists since Antiquity. This pantheon of art was known as the Hemicycle, and for decades it served artists from every country as a model of allegorical fresco painting. In the execution Delaroche went back to the antique technique of encaustic, and was the first artist to do so. This is a method in which hot melted wax is poured over the plaster, and it gives the painting a smooth quality that also repels damp. The German artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld used the same technique for the wall paintings in the Residenz in Munich which he executed for King Ludwig I.

The picture shows the left side of the painting.

In 1837 Delaroche was given an important commission. It was to decorate the apse of the �cole des Beaux-Arts with a cycle of more than 70 of the most famous artists since Antiquity. This pantheon of art was known as the Hemicycle, and for decades it served artists from every country as a model of allegorical fresco painting. In the execution Delaroche went back to the antique technique of encaustic, and was the first artist to do so. This is a method in which hot melted wax is poured over the plaster, and it gives the painting a smooth quality that also repels damp. The German artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld used the same technique for the wall paintings in the Residenz in Munich which he executed for King Ludwig I.

The picture shows the right side of the painting.

This portrait shows the artist’s son at the age of fifteen, half length with a pile of books, having recently recovered from a severe illness.

Delaroche’s work is characterized by scrupulous accuracy in historical detail and a technique that incorporates a glossy finish. His compositions are highly theatrical, imitating waxworks or stage tableaux. He sometimes made wax or plaster models to help him achieve the best arrangement of the figures.

Delaroche’s early work consists mainly of subjects from the Old Testament, while later he chose subjects from French and English history. He was one of the most popular painters of his time, his paintings satisfied the need for education through art and the demand for sensibility. Both his carefully researched interiors and costumes and the theatrical content made his paintings so popular. In The Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England the cultivation of material actually distracts attention from the real subject. But this was in keeping with contemporary taste for decorative history painting, which had gone to extremes in its meticulous attention to detail in the objects, furniture, and costumes.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of ¹⁸²⁷⁄₂₈.

Delaroche’s early work consists mainly of subjects from the Old Testament, while later he chose subjects from French and English history. This work, taken from English history, led to an unusual development. Where other painters frequently worked from theatrical designs, the theatrical nature of this painting led to the image being put back on to the stage. The painting arose so much interest that Casimir Delavigne felt impelled to write a tragedy with a stage set built exactly like Delaroche’s painting.

Anglomania was in fashion in France in the 1820s and 1830s. Interest in British history, fuelled by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, was further stimulated by parallels drawn between recent events in France and the turbulent accounts of Tudors, Stuarts and the Civil War. The pictorial representation of British history may have been pioneered in Britain, but it was the Frenchman Paul Delaroche who gained a European reputation with the grand scenes drawn from it which he exhibited at the annual Paris Salon between 1825 and 1835. Popularised through mass-produced engravings, these set pieces, combining ostentatious antiquarianism with the pseudo-realism of bourgeois melodrama, in turn influenced the painters of national history in mid-Victorian Britain.

The painting depicts the last moments on 12 February 1554 in the life of the seventeen-year old Jane Grey, a great granddaughter of Henry VII who was proclaimed Queen of England upon the death of young King Edward VI, a Protestant like herself. She reigned for nine days in 1553, but, through the machinations of the partisans of Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, she was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in the Tower of London.

Delaroche, who based the painting on a sixteenth-century Protestant martyrology, has falsified the historical account the better to appeal to his contemporaries. Lady Jane Grey, a humanist-educated young married woman, was in fact executed out of doors. Attended by two gentlewomen, probably no less stoical than she, she resolutely made her own way to the block. She could not have worn a white satin dress of nineteenth-century cut with a whalebone corset, and her hair would have been tucked up, not streaming down over her shoulders. But a painting cannot be judged by the criteria of historical accuracy. Much more applicable to this particular picture are the standards of popular melodrama and tableau vivant.

As on a stage, the heroine gropes her way towards the audience, gently guided by the elderly Constable of the Tower whose massive, dark, male presence acts as a foil to her own. A spotlight trained on her from above complements the dim stage lighting, reflecting from her immaculate dress and the straw which spills over into the front row of the stalls. The emotions of each actor are carefully delineated and distinguished, and we are left in no doubt as to the character of each even of the lady in the background who turns her back on the terrible sight.

Two once famous pictures by Delaroche in the Wallace Collection illustrate the contrasting last days of the two great French Cardinals, Mazarin eager for wealth, Richelieu thirsting for revenge.

The Nazarenes painted quasi-devotional portraits of each other and their ideal wives or longed-for lovers, often doomed to early death from common diseases of the time. Perhaps the most extreme expression of this sentiment occurs in a series of religious pictures painted by Delaroche after the death of his wife, Louise Vernet, in 1845. In the finest and strangest of these, the Young Christian Martyr, her features float on the dark waters of the Tiber, lit by the halo of sainthood.

This is a smaller version of the painting exhibited in the Louvre, Paris.