The Death of Marie of Cleves

This watercolour by **Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot**, a painter who regularly exhibited at the Salon during the 1820s, depicts the death of **Marie of Cleves**, Princess of Condé, who died on 30 October 1574 from complications of childbirth, aged twenty-one. The future Henri III had fallen passionately in love with her during his stay in Poland, a passion that alarmed Catherine de' Medici at the prospect that her son might seek to have Marie's marriage to the Prince of Condé annulled in order to marry her himself. Some nineteenth-century commentary, including notes accompanying this work's exhibition, hinted darkly at a suspicious death linked to this court rivalry; no source contemporary with the events, however, supports such a claim, and death in childbirth remains, in historians' eyes, the best-established explanation. The painting chiefly reflects French Romanticism's fascination with the tragic fates of the Valois court.