PASADENA.- The Norton Simon Museum presents Making History: Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian” from the National Gallery, London. On view from November 13, 2026, through March 1, 2027, the exhibition is centered on Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (c. 1867–68), one of the French artist’s most ambitious paintings, made all the more compelling by its now-fragmentary condition.
The second of five versions (four paintings and one print) that Manet created, this monumental work depicts the death by firing squad of Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the short-lived emperor of Mexico, at the hands of forces loyal to ousted Mexican president Benito Juárez in 1867. The execution—along with that of his generals Tomás Mejía and Miguel Miramón—shocked Europe, where many, including Manet, blamed French emperor Napoleon III, who had enticed Maximilian to take the throne.
Despite strict censorship in France, images of the execution and its aftermath circulated widely. Manet drew on published news reports and portrait photographs, but it was the wartime imagery of Spanish artist Francisco de Goya that inspired the composition of this powerful work. The exhibition contextualizes this important loan from the National Gallery, London, with archival materials from the Getty Research Institute that document the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s and the circulation of images of Maximilian and his associates after their deaths.
Says Emily Talbot, Vice President of Collections and Chief Curator at the Norton Simon Museum: “Manet’s Execution of Maximilian is not only an icon within the history of nineteenth-century art, but also a profound reflection on the ways in which images shape our understanding of political events and collective memory. By bringing this extraordinary painting together with historical materials that document the French intervention in Mexico, we invite visitors to consider how history is constructed in visual form.”
Manet was denied the opportunity to exhibit any of his versions of the execution in France during his lifetime, and the London painting languished in his studio where it suffered significant damage. Manet first cropped the painting himself, removing the leftmost figures of Mejía and Maximilian and leaving the emperor represented only by his hand clasping that of Miramón. Following his death in 1883, Manet’s heirs cut up what remained of the composition and sold the pieces separately. Recognizing its importance, Manet’s friend and fellow painter Edgar Degas dedicated himself to acquiring the fragments and reuniting them on a single canvas. The National Gallery acquired the reconstituted painting at Degas’s studio sale in 1918 and restored and remounted it. Manet’s three other paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany.
