Henri IV Besieging Paris

This anonymous painting, executed in the first quarter of the seventeenth century and held at the Musée national du château de Pau, depicts **Henri IV** directing the **siege of Paris** begun on 8 May 1590, when the king hoped to force by famine a League-held capital too populous to hold out long without supplies. Painted close in time to the events, this work belongs to the same generation of commemorative images as other paintings at the château de Pau devoted to the king's military campaigns, such as the Battle of Fontaine-Française. It documents, in the sober style typical of this kind of court historical painting, one of the costliest episodes in human lives of Henri IV's reconquest of the kingdom.