Exhibition labels & didactics - National Gallery of Victoria

Charles BENAZECH
English 1767/68–1794
Louis XVI and the Abbé Edgeworth
de Firmont at the foot of the scaffold,
21 January 1793
Louis XVI et l’Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont
au pied de l’échafaud, le 21 janvier 1793
1793
oil on canvas
Versailles, musée national du château MV 5832
Charles Benazech, an English historical
painter who was studying in Paris when the
French Revolution erupted, here shows
King Louis XVI poised with one foot on the
steps leading to the guillotine, on 21 January
1793, accompanied by the Abbé Edgeworth
de Firmont, his last confessor. While
eyewitness accounts of the King’s
beheading record his final words being
‘I die innocent of the crimes laid against me’,
in the popular imagination to this day his last
words have become ‘Is there still no news
of La Pérouse?’ After Louis XVI’s execution,
Marie-Antoinette remained in prison with her
children until her own beheading,
on 16 October 1793.
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