Charlotte Corday

Paul Baudry's 'Charlotte Corday,' painted in 1860 and now in the Nantes Museum of Arts, depicts the Norman royalist who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in his medicinal bath in July 1793. Corday had become an iconic figure of French historical memory: reviled by republicans as a counter-revolutionary murderer, celebrated by royalists and later by conservatives as a tyrannicide who sacrificed herself to stop the Terror's violence. Baudry's treatment of 1860 — under the Second Empire, when republican iconography was restricted — frames Corday not as villain but as a figure of moral resolve and physical beauty, consistent with the romantic rehabilitation of her image that had been proceeding through French art and literature since the Restoration. The painting's location in Nantes, a city with its own traumatic Revolutionary history (the noyades of Carrier), gives the subject additional regional resonance. Baudry presents Corday in the moment before or after the act, using the format of historical genre painting to combine moral reflection with female beauty.

Oil on canvas in Baudry's academic manner, combining careful historical costume research with the warm, Venetian-influenced flesh tones of his Italian training. The figure is rendered with the precision of a formal portrait while the setting details — dress, hair, expression — are calculated to convey psychological interiority. Composition focuses on the face as the primary vehicle of moral significance.