Charlotte Corday

On 13 July 1793, at the height of the French Revolution's Terror, a young woman named Charlotte Corday talked her way into the home of the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat and stabbed him in his bath. The most famous image of that day is by the revolutionary painter David, made at once as propaganda, showing only the dying Marat slumped in the water. Paul Baudry, working almost seventy years later in 1860, turns the scene around. Marat lies dead at the edge, but the painting belongs to Corday, who stands upright against the wall, having just done it. Baudry lets us look at the assassin rather than the martyr. He showed the canvas at the Paris Salon of 1861, almost seventy years after the killing it depicts.