The reputations of artists are almost always in a state of flux, but the works of few painters can have suffered a more graphic illustration of the descent from superstar to pariah than Paul Delaroche. At the height of his fame this French painter of mostly English historical scenes was critically applauded and popularly fêted on both sides of the Channel. His most famous painting, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, was the star of the Paris Salon of 1834, drawing comparisons with his predecessor Jacques-Louis David, and driving his contemporary, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, into fits of jealousy. Ingres’s own Martyrdom of St Symphorian, hanging opposite Delaroche’s canvas, was all but ignored. Ingres recalled the sight of the Parisian spectators thronging round Delaroche’s work as a “horrible vision”. Reproduced in engravings, Lady Jane Grey retained its popularity through most of the century, and Delaroche inspired numerous other artists, including, in Britain, John Everett Millais.


The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroch

Lady Jane Grey passed from a private collection into British hands and was left to the nation at the turn of the 20th century. Its fame, however, had evaporated, and by 1928 it was kept in the basement of what is now Tate Britain. When the building was flooded in that year, Delaroche’s canvas was removed from its frame, rolled up and put away. Thirty years later it was apparently forgotten. In 1959 the painting was listed as “destroyed”. It was rediscovered only by accident, when in 1973 a young researcher looking for another large-scale painting asked conservators at the Tate to unroll a collection of long-ignored canvases. Lady Jane was one of them, and turned out to be almost perfectly preserved. Transferred to the National Gallery, it was put back on display, and swiftly became one of the most popular works on show.

There it has remained, apparently restored to its proper place, on permanent display in Room 41. On the day I visited the gallery last month, it was drawing appreciably higher footfall than any of its near neighbours. The painting’s popularity can no longer be in doubt. It has even become fashionable again. The modern take on it reinterprets the virginal teenage would-be queen as a bit of a tease. Last year Agent Provocateur, the lingerie company, used a very free interpretation of Delaroche’s scene (introducing a python and removing most of the protagonist’s dress) in an advertising campaign. Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer, has also talked about its effect on him, citing it as the direct influence for his 1999 autumn/winter collection at Givenchy and later nominating it as the greatest painting in Britain in a BBC poll.

Yet the impression persists that the arbiters of artistic taste have not been wholly at ease with Delaroche’s monumental, nerve-jangling masterpiece. The little printed guide stationed in the corner of each room discusses Delaroche’s fellow “Academy” painters, Ingres and Eugène Delacroix, and even name-checks their German and Danish followers, but there is no mention of the canvas that dominates the room. Cecil Gould, the Keeper of the Gallery who first put the painting back on show, wrote in 1975 that Delaroche “is regarded, when the 20th century thinks of him at all, as something of a charlatan who merits his present obscurity”.

At last, however, it looks as if Delaroche will be receiving some of the critical recognition that the public has long agreed he deserves. Nicholas Penny, the present director of the National Gallery, has asked two experts on 18th-century French painting, Stephen Bann and Linda Whiteley, to curate an exhibition that centres on Delaroche and his most famous work. Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey. Once again, Lady Jane is on the move, but this time the upheaval represents a promotion, not a relegation.

Penny hopes that the show will allow serious art-lovers to “escape from the prejudices” against the type of painting — “heroic narrative painting” — of which Delaroche is the master. It has long been fashionable to dismiss Delaroche as falling between two stools, having neither the impassive, sculptural gravity of the Old Masters nor the freedom of expression of more experimental contemporaries, such as Delacroix, or successors. On the contrary, Penny told me, Delaroche should be recognised as trying, and managing, something “dazzlingly new”, “a type of realism associated with small Dutch interiors, but on a grand scale”. We will have an ideal opportunity to test this hypothesis at an associated Delaroche exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London, where numerous little perfections of Dutch interior-painting are on show beside some of the French artist’s work. And look again at the highly finished, shimmering satin of Lady Jane’s dress. This sort of hyper-real attention to detail, which gives Delaroche’s work that dramatic, cinematic quality, had “never been used with such ‘high’ subject-matter”, Penny says.

As well as putting Delaroche in the latest art-historical context, the curators have uncovered material that brings something of the artist’s own, previously hazy story to bear. Delaroche was once portrayed as the model of uxoriousness, devoted to his wife, Louise Vernet, whom he portrayed as (among other things) the Virgin Mary. Two of the most intriguing items that will be shown, however, give a glimpse of Delaroche’s life before Louise. They are love letters written to a French actress, Mlle Anaïs, in which some of the passionate energy that characterises his art shines through. Here is the Romantic painter with a capital and a small “r”: “If you wish me to tell you my thoughts very frankly, my darling, I desire to pass the evening with you, to tell you as much as I can that you are my angel, my happiness and my life! … till this evening at your home by the corner of your fire and on my knees before your eyes which will cry no longer. To you my life, Paul D.”

Anaïs, a petite specialist in the roles of “ingénues”, is thought to have been the model for the young Lady Jane. All those viewers who have detected a whiff of sex in the death scene of Delaroche’s heroine — including Nancy Mitford, who once told Evelyn Waugh that the painting was the source of her teenage sexual fantasies — may have been on to something.

It should come as small surprise that Delaroche fell for an actress. One of the features of his work is its theatricality. Contemporaries praised him for his attention to historical detail, but, while modern observers would find that view hard to sustain, the dramatic impact of his work remains. We can accept when looking at Lady Jane that Delaroche isn’t showing us what really happened. Jane went to her execution unblindfolded, and not in some fantasy Romanesque interior of the Tower of London, but in the open air, on Tower Green.

Those are the facts, but Delaroche gives us high tragedy. Literally high: if you notice the top of the halberds leaning against the wall behind the banister, or that one of the ladies-in-waiting who cannot bear to look supports herself against the very top of a great column, just below its capital, then it is clear that Delaroche has set his execution only feet from the ceiling. Delaroche is known for his knack of putting the action at the very foreground of his composition, so that it seems almost to spill out into the spectator’s space. Here, as the Constable of the Tower helps the groping, blindfolded victim towards the block, we get the vertiginous impression that the whole group might plunge from a great height. The final disorientating effect is achieved by another trick. We might expect a composition with five figures to show five pairs of eyes. In fact, everyone takes their cue from the blindfolded Jane. Her ladies turn away or cast their gaze upwards, the fur-mantled Constable looks not at us but at Jane, and the executioner himself seems to glance down at the straw on the ground, on which he will shortly be spilling the condemned girl’s blood. That they cannot bear to look compels us to look even harder.

Why a French artist should be so taken with English subjects — Delaroche also painted the Princes in the Tower, Elizabeth I and scenes from the English Civil War — is something the exhibition will also touch on. We are reminded of the ubiquity and influence of the work of Sir Walter Scott, and we also begin to see how the French portrayed the fate of English royalty such as Lady Jane or Charles I as a way of averring in public to the still raw memories of their own revolution and the fate of their king and queen. When a Parisian audience saw Delaroche’s rendition (via Shakespeare) of The Princes in the Tower (1830) — captured at the moment a shadow falls outside the door — they would surely have recalled the disappearance of the Dauphin in the Temple prison 35 years earlier.

Perhaps the most exciting exhibit to go on display, one that brings us back to the “rediscovery” of Delaroche, will be shown in a separate room of the Gallery: Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers. Damaged in the Blitz, this canvas was unrolled only last year and has yet to be restored. Visitors will be able to see the painting in its wounded state, torn more than 200 times. Unlike Lady Jane, there seems no chance that it will be rolled up and put away. Delaroche’s days as the forgotten master seem to be over. timesonline.co.uk

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