The Space of Time: Delaroche’s Depiction of Modern Historical Narrative

After 1814, the French looked to parallels in the past to explain the causes of contemporary events. For them historical time was doubled, understood through analogies. Signaling multiple times, easily accomplished in historiographic narratives, posed a challenge to historical painters. Delaroche utilized innovative approaches to representing time in his works, which were praised by contemporary historians and art critics as visual parallels to modern historical literature. In this essay I argue that Delaroche’s repeated visual quotation of works from the Bowyer Historic Gallery enabled him to represent a doubled moment in his historical paintings. I examine his approach to temporality in Jane Grey (1834), Assassination of the duc de Guise (1834), a suite of watercolors (c.1825) on an episode in Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), and Cromwell (1831). The latter was one of several works by Delaroche inspired by Chateaubriand’s Les Quatre Stuarts (1828), an insistently multi-temporal text which compared Stuarts and Bourbons, written to ensure the stability of the newly restored Bourbon dynasty. (BSW)