THE READING LIST I GIVE MY first-year students of nineteenth-century European history is headed by a reproduction of a painting. Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Malaga, was painted in 1888 by the Spaniard Antonio Gisbert Pérez, many of whose canvases celebrated liberal causes, and depicts the 1831 shooting of a group of insurgents who had voyaged from Gibraltar to Malaga to raise a standard against the absolutism of Ferdinand VII.
It is a supremely atmospheric composition, echoing classics like Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, but with a sensibility distinctly its own.
None of my students has yet asked why I
