The Assassination of Henri IV

This engraving by the Antwerp printmaker **Gaspar Bouttats**, produced in the final decades of the seventeenth century, depicts the **assassination of Henri IV**, stabbed on the rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris on 14 May 1610 by the fanatical monk **François Ravaillac**, who took advantage of a traffic obstruction to approach the royal carriage. The composition, typical of narrative engravings of the period, conveys the commotion and shock of the street scene as the regicide strikes the king with several knife blows. Produced only a few decades after the events in the Spanish Netherlands, this print testifies to the rapid spread, through printed imagery, of an event that shook the whole of Europe and ended a twenty-one-year reign.