L'esecuzione del maresciallo Ney

Marshal Ney had been one of Napoleon's bravest commanders, and after Waterloo the restored monarchy had him shot for treason, on a Paris street in December 1815. Gérôme shows the instant after. Ney lies face down in the mud by a graffiti-scrawled wall, his hat fallen beside him, and the firing squad is already marching away in the distance, their backs to us and to him. There is no drama, no last words, just a body left on the ground. When Gérôme showed it at the Paris Salon in 1868, more than fifty years after the event, it still stung. Ney's family asked him to withdraw it and he refused, and critics split hard over whether this counted as history painting or cheap provocation. In 1815 France how you saw this scene depended entirely on how you felt about Napoleon.