Barricade

On this watercolour from 1871, and on the related lithograph, Manet commemorated a tragic event of the Paris Commune: the execution of the communards on the street. For this composition he made use of the landscape-format lithograph he made three years earlier depicting the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. When he decided that this drawing should be portrait-format, he added a strip to the top of the original sheet. With this work Manet expressed scathing political criticism.