Charles I Insulted by Cromwell's Soldiers

Delaroche made his name painting the tragic losers of English history, the boy princes in the Tower, Lady Jane Grey on the scaffold. Here he gives us Charles I in 1649, in the weeks before his own execution, jeered at by Cromwell's soldiers who blow smoke in his face and mock him. He finished it in 1836 in Paris, where audiences had a real appetite for these English royal tragedies. The painting hung in a London mansion until 1941, when a German bomb fell nearby during the Blitz and shrapnel tore the canvas, and for decades afterward it was recorded as lost or destroyed. It turned up again in 2009, rolled up in Scotland and in far better shape than anyone had expected.