Manet and the Execution of Maximillian by Elderfield, John

New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Softbound. As New. Color illustrated wraps. 200 pp., 104 color and bw plates and illustrations. 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.