She was known as the Nine Day’s Queen.
In 1553, at just 15 years old, Lady Jane Grey was reluctantly thrust onto the English throne following the death of Edward VI, her first cousin once removed. The erudite young Jane was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, and fifth in line to the throne. But Jane was a protestant and the devout Edward VI hand-selected his cousin, under the counsel of her father-in-law, John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, to inherit the throne in an ill-fated ploy to block the ascension of his half-sister Mary I, a Catholic.
The subversion fell apart soon after her proclamation, as the public rallied behind Mary I’s rightful claim. Just nine days later, Jane was deposed and Mary I was named queen by the Privy Council of England. Mary I, popularly known as Bloody Mary, had Lady Jane and her husband, Lord Guilford Dudley, imprisoned at the Tower of London for high treason soon after. In February of 1554, Jane, at 16 years of age, was beheaded, along with her husband. Jane’s father, who had organized the unsuccessful Wyatt’s Rebellion, was executed a week later.
The Streatham portrait of Lady Jane Grey by an unknown artist (circa 1590). Collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
However, Lady Jane’s bloody demise was not the end of her story. Over the centuries flashpoints of political upheaval have reignited cultish fascination with the teenage queen, who was viewed by many as a Protestant martyr and figure of purity. Almost 300 years after her tragic death, in 1833, the French academic painter Paul Delaroche painted the most famous depiction of the doomed queen in her final moment, fittingly titled The Execution of Jane Grey. Delaroche had established his reputation with his history paintings that teetered between empathetic emotion and theatrical spectacle, and The Execution of Jane Grey epitomized those tensions to perfection. The imprisoned queen is shown blindfolded in her tower cell kneeling on a turquoise cushion. Her long red hair falls loosely by her neck. She feels cautiously for the wooden block on which her neck will rest for a final time before impending beheading.
To the left of the composition, two women are shown beset by anguish and despair. These are her ladies-in-waiting, who attended to the queen during her imprisonment (in fact, one of the ladies-in-waiting who was with Jane until the end had been her nursemaid in infancy). One woman has collapsed on the ground and holds the outer layer of Lady Jane’s dress, removed before her execution, like a kind of ghost. According to records, Jane requested of the executioner “Please dispatch me quickly,” and then, fumbling blindly but failing to feel for the block where she was to be beheaded cried out “What shall I do? Where is the block?” These are the fraught moments Delaroche depicts, as John Brydges, 1st Baron Chandos, who was the Lieutenant of the Tower at the time of Jane’s execution, is shown guiding her, fatherly and tenderly, toward the place of her death. The executioner, standing to the right of the composition, balances his gleaming, yet worn axe against the floor almost lightly and gazes down pitifully at the young queen. Jane innocently extends her hand, wedding ring shining on her finger as though one might still grasp her and pull her away to safety.
Many scholars believe that Delaroche based his composition for The Execution of Lady Jane Grey on a 1795 print of Mary Queen of Scots in David Hume’s The History of England which itself is based on a now-lost oil painting by the British artist John Opie.
David Hume, Mary Queen of Scots (1795). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When Delarcohe’s painting debuted at the 1834 salon, it struck a chord with the French public. In the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830, which deposed Charles X, the last Bourbon monarch of France, the nation was grappling with its own recent grisly history. Charles X’s brother had been Louis XVI, the last king of France before the Revolution. Lady Jane was a redolent reminder of Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI’s wife.
Now some 470 years after her death, Lady Jane Grey has once again captured the public’s imagination—and Delaroche’s canvas has had something to do with it. Earlier this year, My Lady Jane, a streaming series based on a best-selling book, debuted on Hulu offering a fictionalized and fantastical retelling of her story (with sci-fi elements to boot). The series’ creators seem to have eschewed Delaroche’s famed vision of the queen for painting the dynamic Jane as a damsel in distress (a cartoon version of the painting makes a cameo in the opening sequence). But for many others, particularly Tiktokers, Delaroche’s vision is indelibly linked to the Queen’s story, and they’ve flocked to the National Gallery in London to offer their interpretations.
With that in mind, we’ve taken a closer look at this perennial favorite and found three facts that might enliven the way you see it.
Delaroche Aimed for Accuracy, But Created a Franco-British Mishmash
Detail of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey.
Delaroche painted in a transitional style known as juste milieu, which fell between the Neoclassical and Romantic eras and incorporated compositional bits of both. Delaroche was an intriguing, hard-to-define painter. In his time, he was acclaimed for his dramatic scenes from French and English history, but despite traditional subject matter, he embraced innovative approaches such as painting en plein air. Unlike pure Romantic painters, such as Delacroix, however, Delaroche did aim toward historical accuracy, though certainly not to perfection. In the case of The Execution of Jane Grey, the painting becomes a quizzical mishmash of eras and cultures.
Detail of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche.
Lady Jane Grey was executed outdoors, in the Tower Yard, as Anne Boleyn had been, but Delaroche seems to have depicted the scene indoors. This may have been a stylistic choice that allowed him to create an evocative, shadowy setting for her death. Here, the foreground of the painting becomes almost like a stage, with a black drape of fabric covering the ground bunched up in the far right corner, revealing the artist’s signature written as though on the edge of an elevated wooden platform, the type of structure typical of royal executions of the French Revolution.
The architectural details of the interior space are also quite French. While the Tower of London was established by William of Normandy, the site of Jane’s imprisonment was a later addition some 500 years later under Henry VIII. Here, however, Delaroche embellishes the space with Norman columns, arches, and a blind arcade of a long-bygone era of Norman influence in England. In the 1820s and ‘30s, the French public found a new fascination for the English revolutions and uprisings of the 16th century, seeing parallels with their own time and recent history. In this way, wittingly or not, Delaroche created English historical scenes that appealed to French aesthetics and concerns.
Highlights of Ghostly White and Bloody Red Heighten the Suspense
Detail of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche.
Delaroche heightens the drama of his scene through multiple compositional techniques, be it the axe hovering at the edge of the composition or the heavenly light spotlighting Jane at the center. The artist’s engagement with color, too, adds a sense of anticipation as touches of white are used to pull the eye through the canvas.
The luminous white of Jane’s gown is the most evocative of these instances, as it seems to glow from within, giving off its own light rather than reflecting any single source. Jane radiates like an emblem of purity and virtue, her gown denoting her virtue in lieu of a halo. Similarly, Delaroche has added highlights to the extended necks of both her ladies-in-waiting, adding a white choker to the neck of the woman turned away from the viewer, hinting at the act to come. Among the brightest marks in the composition can be found on Jane’s blindfold and on the edge of the wood block where her head will rest for the execution, subconsciously tying these two symbols together and more metaphorically suggesting the “white light” of death.
Red serves a similar purpose, too. The hay piled before Jane would be used to soak up blood—something viewers of the time would have understood. Delaroche doesn’t show us the moment of grisly death but alludes to it in the bright red of the executioner’s tights. The red tights also balance the deep crimson of the dress of the lady-in-waiting who slumps to the ground, her eyes closed, looking lifeless, on the other side of the canvas. These two figures create a timeline for the events—the executioner is the before, and the collapsed woman the after, as Jane glows in the middle.
The Painting Was Long Believed to Have Been Destroyed
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) by Paul Delaroche, on display at the Tate Britain in London. Photo by Sean Dempsey. PA Images/PA Images and Getty Images.
The painting’s fame has only been heightened by its believed loss and subsequent rediscovery. Soon after debuting at the 1834 Salon, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was acquired by Russian industrialist Anatoly Nikolaievich Demidov. Over the decades it changed hands several times until 1902 when its then-owner William Eaton, 2nd Baron Cheylesmore, bequeathed the painting to the National Gallery, London, along with four other paintings. The painting, which had fallen out of fashion, had been placed in museum storage at the Tate Gallery. In 1928, the historic flooding of the Thames River ravaged the Gallery, and the painting was believed to have been destroyed.
Nearly 50 years later, in 1973, Tate curator Christopher Johnstone rediscovered the canvas by accident. He was finishing a book on British painter John Martin and searching for missing paintings by the artist. He uncovered Martin’s painting The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum rolled inside The Execution of Lady Jane Gray. While Martin’s painting was badly water-damaged, Delaroche’s work was mostly unscathed and was transferred to the National Gallery where it was ultimately put on public view. Today, it numbers among the most visited works in the collection.