Cromwell before the Coffin of Charles I

At the Paris Salon of 1831, the first held after the revolution that put Louis-Philippe on the throne, the picture everyone crowded around was Paul Delaroche's large, polished scene of Oliver Cromwell lifting the lid of the executed King Charles the First's coffin to study the body. Delacroix, who thought Delaroche's smooth history painting overrated, answered with this small watercolour of the same moment, looser and more brooding, worked up for himself rather than for the public wall. Both men leaned on the same source, a vivid tale by the writer Chateaubriand that has no real historical backing. Cromwell never opened that coffin. What drew these French painters was the image of a regicide standing over the king he had helped kill, in a France that had sent its own king, Louis the Sixteenth, to the guillotine four decades earlier.