François Aubert
1867
[Emperor Maximilian's Firing Squad]

Albumen silver print, from glass negative
11.4 x 14.2 cm (4 7/16 x 5 9/16 ins) (image) 18.2 x 22.1 cm (7 3/16 x 8 11/16 ins) (mount)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005, Accession Number: 2005.100.580.1
 
Formerly attributed to Noriega.
 
Comments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 
Legend maintains that Maximilan paid each of the seven executors shown here one ounce of gold not to shoot him in the head; he wanted, the story asserts, his mother to see his face one last time when he was in his coffin. The French painter Edouard Manet turned his eye to the events of June 19, 1867, in his large oil Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867), now in the collection of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany.
 
LL/40399