Edith Recovering Harold's Body after the Battle of Hastings

When Horace Vernet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1827, he was known for painting Napoleon's recent wars, the smoke and cavalry of his own lifetime. Here he reached back more than 760 years instead. After the Battle of Hastings in 1066 the English king Harold Godwinson lay dead and so badly disfigured that no one could name him. The task fell to Edith the Fair, the woman who had shared his life, and Vernet paints the moment she and a monk point to the body among the broken palisades, a sheet drawn over the ruined face. Medieval English history was in fashion in Restoration France, and Vernet gave it the scale of a battlefield he had never seen. The canvas runs well over three metres wide.