Anyone who paints an execution has to decide which moment the viewer will see, and most of the painters on this list chose not to show the blow. Behind their pictures are a son who tried to keep his father's death out of an exhibition, and hanged men that an X-ray found under a layer of paint.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
An execution painting shows a death sentence being carried out, or the minutes just before or after it. For centuries, executions were public, staged as a warning to the crowd. Painters gave them a second audience, first in churches, later at exhibitions.
The subject offered two things. It sets up a confrontation that needs no explanation, armed men facing one person who cannot fight back. And a martyr's death or an execution from the past counted as history painting, the genre the academies ranked highest.
The twelve pictures below, painted between 1608 and 1888, were chosen for the moment each painter decided to show. In 1766, the German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing advised artists to stop short of the climax, and the painters here split over that advice.
12. The Execution of Torrijos and His Companions on the Beach at Málaga, Antonio Gisbert (1888)
On a beach at Málaga, in southern Spain, a man in a long brown coat grips the hands of the two men beside him. Bodies already lie on the sand at their feet, some still blindfolded, and the next row of prisoners waits for the volley. Antonio Gisbert finished the canvas in 1888, and the man in brown is General José María Torrijos, a liberal and a former minister of war.
Torrijos had come back from exile to lead a revolt against Ferdinand VII, the absolute king of Spain. He and his companions were caught near Málaga and shot without trial on 11 December 1831.
Spain honored them more than fifty years later, when a liberal government commissioned this picture by royal decree. Gisbert treated it as a group portrait as much as a history painting. He traveled to Málaga and talked with the children and grandchildren of the executed men, and what they told him helped him give each face a likeness.
Next to those faces, the soldiers look small. Gisbert pushes the firing squad to the far right, packed together, rifles ready. His hardest image lies at the bottom edge, where the frame cuts through one of the dead and leaves only a hand and a leather top hat. Because the rest of the man is left to the imagination, that fragment is harder to look at than the bodies painted whole.
At a Glance
Artist: Antonio Gisbert (1834 to 1902)
Painted: 1888
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 392.5 × 602.5 cm (155 × 237 in)
Where to see it: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
11. Refusal of Confession (Before Confession), Ilya Repin (1879 to 1885)
A priest holds out a small cross to a man sentenced to death, in a dark prison cell. The prisoner sits on an iron bed, wrapped in a gray robe, and his bare chest carries no baptismal cross. Whether he will take the cross is the one thing the picture does not say, and the titles it has carried since have not agreed on the answer.