La Femme de l'artiste, Louise Vernet, sur son lit de mort

La Femme de l'artiste, Louise Vernet, sur son lit de mort from 1846 by Paul Delaroche is a heartbreaking deathbed portrait of his wife, Louise Vernet, who died that year. Louise was the daughter of the celebrated battle painter Horace Vernet and had been at the center of Parisian artistic society. Her death devastated Delaroche, who never remarried and largely withdrew from public life in his final decade. Unlike his theatrical history paintings staged for maximum emotional effect, this intimate work has the anguished simplicity of personal grief—the artist rendering his wife's final likeness with professional precision mobilized entirely for private mourning. The painting is held at the Nantes Museum of Arts. It occupies a place in French Romantic painting alongside other great works of marital elegy, its restraint making it more devastating than any theatrical composition could have been.

The deathbed portrait is rendered with agonizing precision, Delaroche's technique applied to his own wife's final likeness with both professional skill and personal anguish.