Cromwell before the Coffin of Charles I

When this scene was first shown, at the Paris Salon of 1831, France had just pushed out a king of its own that summer in the July Revolution, and the older visitors could still remember the guillotining of Louis the Sixteenth in 1793. A French crowd came to Delaroche's picture of an English regicide already primed. He shows Oliver Cromwell, the commoner who ruled England after Charles the First was beheaded in 1649, alone with the dead king. The moment never happened. It comes from a story by the writer Chateaubriand, who imagined Cromwell having the coffin opened at night to look at the body. Cromwell lifts the lid and studies the corpse, and Delaroche keeps his face deliberately hard to read, so the same man can look grief-stricken or grimly satisfied. Look at the king's neck, where the severed head has been stitched back into place and a thin red line marks where the axe fell. To get the lighting and the pose right, Delaroche worked from a small stage model, its figures built in plaster by set-designers from the Paris opera.