Delaroche specialised in scenes from French and English history. This drawing was commissioned for a wedding album presented to the duc de Montpensier and Marie Louise Fernande of Bourbon. It relates to a painting which Delaroche completed in 1856, now in the Conciergerie, Paris. The subject, from the French Revolution, is the moment when the moderate Girondin députés, imprisoned in the Conciergerie, learn of their death sentence. They were executed in 1793 on the orders of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Paul Delaroche (French, 1797 - 1856)
Delaroche trained in the studios of Watelet and Gros and first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1822. He began to specialise in scenes from French and English history (his best known painting in Britain is `The Execution of Lady Jane Grey? in the National Gallery, London). In 1833 he was made professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where his pupils included Couture and Gerome. His major achievement was the large panorama (twenty-seven metres in length) of `The Hemicycle? for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, painted between 1837 and 1841. It was completed with the aid of four assistants and depicts a total of over seventy artists in conversation, ranging in date from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.
