François Aubert

François Aubert, French (1829 - 1906).

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.