The Death of Charles IX

This painting by Raymond Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin, executed in 1834 and held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, depicts the deathbed scene of Charles IX, who died at the château de Vincennes on 30 May 1574. The king, barely twenty-three years old and carried off by tuberculosis, is shown surrounded by his mother Catherine de' Medici and his wife Elisabeth of Austria, in the final moments of a fourteen-year reign marked by the Wars of Religion and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Painted two and a half centuries after the events, this nineteenth-century work reflects its era's taste for romantic history painting, emphatically restoring the tragic dimension of a premature death without a male heir, which opened the way to the regency of Catherine de' Medici and then to the accession of Henry III.