The return from flight: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, Dauphiness, and Princess Elizabeth insulted by the mob on their road back to Paris after their interception at Varennes by the postmaster Drouet

Ward’s easel paintings, which he exhibited regularly and to great acclaim at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and Suffolk Street, were concerned almost exclusively with English seventeenth and eighteenth-century history, the French Revolution and Napoleon, or such authors of the period as Goldsmith and Molière. Of these subjects Ward is perhaps best known for his scenes of the life of Marie-Antoinette and the French Revolution with which he was preoccupied from the 1850s until the 1870s. His interest in French history is in keeping with his style. Although he was far from unique among English artists in his taste for historical genre, he is closer to a painter like Delaroche in France, and it is significant that he enjoyed an international training, including a number of weeks in Paris.

When it appeared at the Royal Academy in 1872 the Art Journal critic wrote, 'He has painted many very fine pictures illustrative of the misfortunes of the family of Louis XVI, but in this he seems to have summed up the merits of all the others.’ Other examples of his Marie Antoniette subjects include The Last Parting of Marie Antoinette and her Son (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856 and sold in these Rooms on 11 December 2014, lot 29), Marie Antoinette listening to the Reading of the Act of her Accusation by Fouquier Tinville in the Conciergerie, 1859, and The Royal Family of France in the Prison of the Temple – Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, Dauphiness, and Madame Elizabeth, the King’s Sister, 1851 (Harris Museum & Art Gallery).