Édouard Manet - The Barricade 1871
The Barricade. Civil War 1871
46x32cm silverpoint, black ink, watercolour,
gouache on paper; verso: black chalk
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary
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From Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest:
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.