‘Robespierre watching his victims’ by Eyre Crowe (1867)
Medium: oil
Size: 13.7 x 10.5 inches (34.9 x 26.7cm)
Exhibited: Dudley Gallery, 1867 (no. 72), as ‘Robespierre’
“He used to dine at a place, whence the guillotine and the carts going to it could be seen.” Vide “Prudhomme’s Histoire des Revolutions de Paris”
This painting was exhibited by Crowe at the first annual exhibition of cabinet oil paintings at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in November and December 1867. According to Crowe’s diary entries in January 1868, it was part-exchanged with a painting by another exhibitor, a Dutchman named Mr Dommersen, with Dommersen paying Crowe £29 for the difference in value between the two pictures. By 1872 it was in the collection of Mr D. Roberts of Old Kent Road, London [Art Journal, February 1872]
It is perhaps the same painting which was auctioned, as ‘Robespierre watching his victims’, at Sotheby’s in New York on 24 November 1987, reaching US $2,000.
Morning Post, 11 November 1867:
An expressive little picture (72) by Mr. Eyre Crowe depicts the miscreant of the Revolution as having just sprung up from the dinner-table and rushed to the window, whence he surveys with savage satisfaction the passing of the tumbril in the street below.
Eyre Crowe (1824-1910) 