The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

The firing squad here wears sombreros and loose clothes, which is how Manet imagined Mexican republican soldiers in July 1867. Maximilian had been shot at Querétaro on the 19th of June, and the news reached Paris in scraps at the start of the next month. Manet began this canvas almost at once, the first of his attempts at the subject.

With few hard facts to work from, he turned for the arrangement to Francisco de Goya's Third of May 1808, which he had most likely seen at the Prado in Madrid in 1865. Goya's painting shows soldiers of the first Napoleon shooting Spanish civilians. The emperor who had sent French troops to Mexico and then pulled them out was that Napoleon's nephew.

As fuller reports arrived, Manet started again on new canvases, and this one stayed in the studio, broadly brushed and unresolved. After his death it passed to Léon Leenhoff, who sold it to the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1899. The Boston collector Frank Gair Macomber bought it in 1909, and later said that the painter Mary Cassatt had taken him to see it in Paris.