Édouard Manet painted the execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico four times. Maximilian, a Habsburg archduke, had accepted the Mexican crown in 1864 with the backing of Napoleon III's French troops. After the French withdrew, Mexican republican forces captured him, and he was shot by firing squad on June 19, 1867.
The version coming to Pasadena is the second of the four. The Norton Simon Museum will show it from November 13, 2026 to March 1, 2027, on loan from the National Gallery in London.
Why it looks the way it does
The painting is in pieces, and will stay that way. After Manet's death his family cut the damaged canvas into fragments to sell. Edgar Degas bought them, hoping to reassemble the picture, and the National Gallery acquired them at the sale of Degas's collection in 1918. The fragments are now mounted together on a canvas the size of the original, so the gaps are part of what is on the wall.
A history painting that history itself cut up.
The other versions
The fourth and final version is whole, and hangs in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. That is the painting in the photograph above, and it is not the one coming to Pasadena. The Pasadena picture is the other kind of survivor: the one that was broken, and then put back as far as it could be.
