The Last Moments of Michel Lepeletier

In January 1793 the deputy Michel Lepeletier voted for the execution of Louis XVI and was stabbed to death that same night by a royalist. The Revolution needed martyrs, and Jacques-Louis David, its leading painter and a deputy himself, produced this deathbed portrait for the hall of the National Convention. He hung it as one of a set with his Death of Marat, turning two murdered politicians into secular saints. The picture no longer exists. After the Terror passed it was returned to David, and his family later sold it to Lepeletier's own daughter, who had grown up on the royalist side. She is thought to have destroyed it, along with the prints made after it, to erase her father's part in killing the king. What survives is known only from a drawing and a few engravings.