In Édouard Manet’s painting of the execution of Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian, the emperor himself is reduced to a hand. It clasps the hand of General Miguel Miramón at the left edge of a canvas nearly nine and a half feet wide. The rest of Maximilian and the figure of General Tomás Mejía are missing. Enough of the painting survives to see how Manet arranged the scene, and enough is gone to see what happened to the picture after he made it.
The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, puts the painting on view Friday, Nov. 13, through March 1, 2027. The museum says this is the first West Coast showing of the canvas, on loan from the National Gallery in London. Archival material from the Getty Research Institute traces the French occupation of Mexico and the circulation of images of the emperor and his associates after their deaths.
Why Manet painted the execution
Maximilian was an Austrian archduke whom Napoleon III backed as emperor of Mexico in 1864. France pulled out its troops, and Mexican Republican forces loyal to Benito Juárez captured Maximilian. He and his generals Miramón and Mejía were executed at Querétaro on June 19, 1867. In France the news drew attention to Napoleon III’s role in putting Maximilian on the throne and then withdrawing his military support.
The National Gallery’s account describes Manet returning to the subject as more reports and photographs reached France. In the earliest painting, now in Boston, he placed the figures in an open landscape. The London canvas is his second painted version. The gallery says he probably abandoned it because the size of the figures made their positions look too close together. He kept the arrangement of the figures when he returned to the scene in a small oil sketch and in the final large painting, now in Mannheim, Germany.
Manet had seen Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808 in Spain. The National Gallery finds the reference most apparent in the early Boston canvas, though the Pasadena exhibition uses Goya’s wartime imagery to place the London version in context. In Goya’s painting, a lantern lights a man in a white shirt with both arms raised. In the surviving London Manet, the most complete group is the line of soldiers. The main figure is barely visible, in part because the canvas itself was cut.
The print that French censors stopped
Manet also made an 1868 lithograph, a version that could have reached a much larger audience than a single canvas. French authorities suppressed it in January 1869. An edition of 50 was printed in 1884, the year after Manet died. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the impression shown here. Its composition remains intact, so it gives readers a separate view of how Manet handled the same subject in print.
How the fragments came back together
An 1883 photograph already shows damage and the left portion missing. Manet’s heirs cut up and sold pieces of what remained. Edgar Degas bought surviving fragments, and the National Gallery acquired them at the sale of his collection in 1918. The gallery eventually mounted the fragments together. The areas of exposed canvas mark losses the reconstruction could not fill. In a National Gallery video, curator Anne Robbins explains how Degas reunited the pieces.
Seeing the exhibition in Pasadena
The museum is at 411 W. Colorado Blvd. Friday and Saturday hours are noon to 7 p.m. General admission is $20 for adults and $15 for visitors 62 and older. The museum also offers free admission on the first Friday of each month from 4 to 7 p.m. The Nov. 14 exhibition lecture starts at 5 p.m. The museum says additional walk-up tickets will be released at 4 p.m. that day.
.jpg)
