L'esecuzione di Lady Jane Grey

Delaroche finished this huge canvas in 1833, and for once the painting's own survival is as dramatic as its subject. He shows the last seconds before the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, the teenager who was queen of England for nine days in 1553 before Mary Tudor took the throne. Blindfolded and in white, she gropes for the block while an official guides her hand toward it. The picture was wildly popular in its day, then fell out of fashion and went into storage. It was caught in the flooding of the Tate Gallery when the Thames burst its banks in 1928, and for decades afterwards it was assumed to have been destroyed. In 1973 a curator hunting for a different lost painting found it rolled up, in surprisingly good condition. It was cleaned and put back on the wall in 1975, and the crowds returned with it.