Jacques de Caumont

Frederick Sandys

1862

Wood engraving by Joseph Swain

5 x 4½ inches

Illustration for Once a Week, 24 May 1862, p.614.

An illustration to a short story by Sabine Baring-Gould about the persecution of Huguenots and the Eve of St Bartholomew massacre. This shows Jacques, positioned unconventionally on the far left, as he overhears a man boasting to another of having murdered Jacques’s father. Grotesque in its combination of levity of horror, the everyday and the frightening, the image typifies Sandys’s fascination with complex and unsettling emotions.

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