Goya Paints the Violence of Occupation

In February 1814, following the expulsion of Napoleonic forces from Spain, Francisco Goya petitioned Spain's Regency Council for support. He proposed to paint canvases that would commemorate the popular uprising against French occupation. The authorities agreed, and Goya produced a pair of large works: The Second of May 1808, showing street combat in Madrid, and The Third of May 1808, illustrating the nocturnal executions carried out by French troops immediately afterward. Completed that same year, the latter work departed sharply from traditional battle art by depicting the bleak reality of wartime reprisals.

The events behind the painting had unfolded six years earlier, after Napoleon summoned the Spanish king Charles IV and his son Ferdinand to Bayonne, in France, intending to make them give up the crown. On May 2, 1808, the citizens of Madrid mounted the Dos de Mayo rebellion against the occupying army, trying to stop the remaining members of the royal family from being taken out of the city. French commander Marshal Joachim Murat responded with swift retaliation, ordering that anyone captured with weapons be executed. Before dawn on May 3, French soldiers rounded up and shot hundreds of Spaniards at several locations around the city. This sequence of street revolt and brutal suppression ignited the wider Peninsular War.