Henry IV Bringing Food Supplies into Paris (August 1590)

In the spring of 1783 the office that ran the king's buildings and arts ordered a set of paintings on the life of Henri IV, to be woven as tapestries at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. Henri, the first Bourbon king, was the ancestor the monarchy most liked to hold up, the good king who cared for his people, and Louis XVI's ministers were glad to see him on the walls. Vincent painted this canvas for the set that same year.

The episode is the siege of Paris in the summer of 1590. Henri was then a Protestant, not accepted as king by the Catholic League that held the capital, and his army had been starving the city for months. The story the painting tells is that, moved by the famine, he let food through to the people he was besieging. He stands in armour on a rise outside the walls, an officer at his side points his sword towards the distant city, and in the foreground a man leans on a barrel of supplies beside a cannon.

The tapestry was never woven. In 1794 a revolutionary jury judged the picture unsuitable to be made into a tapestry, and it later returned to the museum. Five other paintings made for the same set between 1784 and 1787 are on deposit at Fontainebleau.