Abandoned by the French government that crowned him and sent him to Mexico, the Emperor Maximilian was executed by a firing squad of Benito Juárez's army at Querétaro, north of Mexico City, on June 19, 1867. News of the execution reached Paris on July 1, just as Napoleon III was inaugurating that year's Universal Exposition. Édouard Manet set to work almost immediately, and by early 1869 he had completed a series of four paintings and one lithograph of the subject. Manet and the Execution of Maximilian unites several of these works for the first time in the United States, with selected additional works that examine the evolution from one painting to the next, which was fuelled by a steady stream of written and graphic accounts of the event. The exhibition is accompanied by education programs and a fully illustrated catalogue.
Organized by John Elderfield, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
