The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

In the summer of 1867 news reached Paris that Maximilian, the Austrian archduke whom Napoleon III had placed on a throne in Mexico, had been shot by a Mexican firing squad once the French troops holding him up were withdrawn. Many in France blamed their own emperor, and Manet was outraged. He painted the execution four times, and this canvas is the second. By 1883 its left side had already been cut away, and after Manet's death his family divided what remained and sold the pieces separately. Edgar Degas, his friend, tracked the fragments down and bought them, and the National Gallery acquired them at the sale of his collection in 1918. Only in the late 1970s were they mounted together on one canvas. Of the victims almost nothing survives, just a head at the top left and, below it, a pair of clasped hands.