It depicts a scene from the
French Revolution from 10 August 1792 when the
Tuileries Palace in
Paris was
stormed by armed revolutionaries. The revolutionaries of Paris are portrayed as a
Hogarthian mob, having broken into the
wine cellar of
Louis XVI. Zoffany also produced another painting of the day's events
Celebrating Over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers which shows the women of Paris dancing by the corpses of the
Swiss Guards who had been killed in the fighting. By the time the painting was produced
Louis XVI had been guillotined and France had declared war on Britain which joined the
First Coalition against the
French Republic. Zoffany had only briefly visited Paris once in 1772 and his depiction of Tuileries is largely imaginary. The painting was displayed at the
Royal Academy's
Summer Exhibition of 1795 at
Somerset House in
London.
Richard Earlom produced a
mezzotint based on the work in 1795, which was widely circulated. Today the painting is in the collection of the
Wadsworth Atheneum in
Connecticut. ==References==