Paul Delaroche

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Delaroche painted a man being led to his death while an archbishop stretched his arms from a prison window to bless him. No heroic light bathed the scene. No flattering angle softened the horror. Delaroche wanted you to feel the weight of that corridor.

  Born Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche on the 17th of July 1797 in Paris, he came of age in a city still sorting through the wreckage of revolution and empire. The artistic world around him was locked in a bitter argument: the classical tradition on one side, the rising tide of Romanticism on the other. Delaroche refused to pick a side. He carved out his own territory between those two camps and spent his career defending it.

  His paintings made him famous across France and Britain. His most celebrated work, the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, hung in London's National Gallery and was the most acclaimed painting of its day. Then, in 1837, he walked away from public exhibitions entirely. What happened next, and why, is one of the stranger episodes in nineteenth-century art.

• 2. Between Two Movements

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  Davidian Classicism was the dominant style when Delaroche was learning to paint. It was widely accepted and enjoyed by French society, and it placed high value on idealized forms, clear moral messages, and the rational dignity of ancient subjects. Romanticism arrived in Paris as a deliberate challenge to all of that.

  Delaroche grew up in a family already steeped in art. His father, Gregoire-Hippolyte Delaroche, was a prominent art dealer in Paris, and Paul was the second of two sons introduced to fine art at a young age. At nineteen, his father arranged for him to study at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Louis Etienne Watelet, with an expectation that he would focus on landscapes. The reasoning was practical: his older brother Jules-Hippolyte already painted history, and the family wanted no overlap.

  Delaroche lasted two years before telling his father plainly that landscapes held no interest for him. He left L'Ecole at the end of 1817 and entered the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, one of the most influential painters of the Napoleonic era. Gros opened the door to history painting, and Delaroche walked through it and never looked back.

  The tension between his academic training and his time with Gros shaped everything that followed. His schooling at L'Ecole tied him to Academicism and Neoclassicism, while Gros stirred his appetite for history told with passion and movement. Joan of Arc in Prison, shown at the Salon of 1824, announced the balance he was seeking: emotional intensity held inside a precisely finished surface.

• 3. The English History Paintings

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  In 1828, Delaroche showed Death of Queen Elizabeth at the Salon, marking his first venture into English subject matter. It turned out to be a shrewd move. His focus on English history brought him considerable popularity in Britain through the 1830s and 1840s, an unusual achievement for a French painter working in Paris.

  The paintings that made his reputation in this period were unflinching in their subject matter. Cromwell Gazing at the Body of Charles I, shown in 1831 and now in the museum at Nimes, placed two enemies in the same room: the man who ordered the execution and the man who was executed. The Princes in the Tower, also from 1831 and held in the Louvre in Paris, depicted two children facing an uncertain fate with no adult capable of protecting them.

  The Execution of Lady Jane Grey arrived in 1833 and became the most acclaimed of all his works in its day. It now hangs in the National Gallery in London. A sixteen-year-old woman, blindfolded, kneels before the block while those around her barely hold themselves together. There is no grandeur in the scene, no noble resignation meant to inspire. Delaroche wanted the viewer to feel the wrongness of it.

  His approach to these subjects was deliberate. He researched costumes, accessories, and settings with care, and he painted with meticulous detail and clear contours to anchor each scene in something that felt historically real. German literary critic Heinrich Heine observed that Delaroche had no great predilection for the past in itself, but for its representation and for writing history in colors. The Academie des Beaux-Arts recognized the achievement by electing him a member in 1832, and a year later he became a professor at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

• 4. The Break With the Salons

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  In 1833, the same year the Execution of Lady Jane Grey was drawing crowds, Delaroche received a commission to paint a large mural at the central nave of L'Eglise de la Madeleine in Paris. He acknowledged frankly that he lacked experience in religious painting and spent a year in Italy studying the religious works of the past.

  When he returned, he was told he would be working alongside Jules-Claude Ziegler. He refused the collaboration entirely, certain that Ziegler would compromise the vision he had already formed. The project was abandoned.

  In 1837 he exhibited St. Cecilia, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as the first of his significant religious paintings. French critics were not impressed. His change of subject struck them as less compelling than his historical work, and the austere manner of the painting did not help.

  The reception stung. Combined with his broader rejection of the Davidian values that still shaped French official culture, it pushed him toward what the sources describe as a self-imposed exile from the government-sponsored Salons. After 1837, he stopped showing his work publicly. He had been one of the most celebrated painters in France, and he simply withdrew.

  The withdrawal did not mean idleness. In 1838 and again in 1843 he visited Italy, both times while his father-in-law Horace Vernet was serving as director of the French Academy in Rome. In 1845 he was elected an Honorary Academician of the National Academy of Design in New York, a recognition that crossed the Atlantic even as he remained invisible in Paris.

• 5. Louise Vernet

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  Delaroche's love for Louise Vernet, daughter of painter Horace Vernet, was described as the absorbing passion of his life. He married her in 1835, and that same year he exhibited Head of an Angel, a work based on a study of her.

  Louise died in 1845 at the age of thirty-one. By all accounts, Delaroche never recovered from the shock of losing her.

  In the years that followed, he turned to a sequence of small, elaborate pictures drawn from the Passion of Jesus. The focus was not theological argument but human grief. One painting showed Mary and the apostles hearing the crowd cheering Jesus along the Via Dolorosa, a moment of dread before the full weight of events becomes clear. Another showed St. John escorting Mary home after her son's death.

  His final project, left unfinished at his death, was a series of four scenes from the Life of the Virgin. Only one work from the series was completed: the Virgin Contemplating the Crown of Thorns.

• 6. The Hemicycle

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  The commission from architect Felix Duban arrived in 1837, the same year Delaroche retreated from the Salons. The task was to fill the hemicycle of the award theatre at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with a mural that would represent the history of art itself.

  Delaroche conceived a panorama twenty-seven metres long. Seventy-five great artists from across all ages stand in conversation, gathered in groups on either side of a central elevation of white marble steps. At the top of those steps sit three thrones occupied by the creators of the Parthenon: sculptor Phidias, architect Ictinus, and painter Apelles, placed together to represent the unity of the arts. The arrangement was influenced by Raphael's School of Athens, that famous gathering of ancient philosophers recast here as a gathering of artists.

  To introduce a female presence into the composition, Delaroche added idealized female figures representing the muses, leaning against the balustrade of the steps. The painting was executed not in fresco but directly onto the wall in encaustic mixtures, a technique in which pigment is combined with hot wax and painted onto plaster to produce a smooth surface. Four of his students assisted him, and the work ran from 1837 to 1841.

  In 1855 a fire severely damaged the Hemicycle. Delaroche spent the last year of his life working to restore it but died on the 4th of November 1856 before much was accomplished. The restoration was completed by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury.

• 7. Painting and Photography

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  Delaroche is often quoted as saying, from today, painting is dead. The observation was probably made in 1839, when he saw examples of the Daguerreotype, the first successful photographic process.

  Whether he believed it literally or meant it as a provocation, the remark has followed his name ever since. The irony is that Delaroche had spent his career building paintings that did something no photograph of 1839 could do: reconstruct a past moment with narrative specificity, populate it with psychologically legible figures, and hold it inside a frame long enough for a viewer to feel the weight of what was happening.

  Among the students Delaroche mentored over his career were Thomas Couture, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jean-Francois Millet, Gustave Boulanger, British landscape artist Henry Mark Anthony, British history painters Edward Armitage and Charles Lucy, and American painter and photographer Alfred Boisseau, who was born in 1823 and died in 1901. The reach of that mentorship extended well past his own withdrawal from public life.

  In 2016, the BBC television programme Fake or Fortune? investigated the authenticity of a version of Delaroche's Saint Amelia, Queen of Hungary. Professor Stephen Bann, a leading Delaroche expert, concluded that the version, which had been bought for 500 pounds in 1989 by the late art collector and dealer Neil Wilson and was housed at Castle of Park in Cornhill, Aberdeenshire, was in fact the lost original. The painting was subsequently sold through Christie's in July 2019 for 33,750 pounds.