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Bound wrists, joined hands, the row waiting its turn. Gisbert painted the faces from portraits so the deaths would stay individual.

After the liberal constitution of 1820 was crushed by French bayonets at absolutist request, Spain entered what its own historians call the Ominous Decade, and the liberals who survived it worked from exile: London committees, Gibraltar safe houses, invasion schemes on borrowed money. General José María Torrijos was the exiles' soldier, a man who had fought the French at sixteen and the absolutists ever after, and in 1831 he prepared the landing that would raise Andalusia. The governor of Málaga, González Moreno, wrote to him secretly for months as a fellow conspirator, fixing signals, promising garrisons. It was bait from the first letter. Torrijos crossed from Gibraltar on 2 December with about 60 men, among them Robert Boyd, a 26-year-old Irish officer who had put his inheritance into the expedition; they were herded inland, surrounded, and taken without a battle. There was no trial of any kind. The royal order that came back from Madrid ran, in effect, to one line: shoot them all. On the morning of 11 December 1831, on the beach of San Andrés at Málaga, Torrijos and 48 companions were lined up on the sand with their hands bound and, by the accounts the city kept, holding one another's hands down the row; friars moved along the line with blindfolds; Torrijos is said to have kissed his own bonds before kneeling. The volleys took them in batches. Boyd's body was released to the British consul; the governor who wrote the letters was promoted, and carried the nickname the executioner of Málaga to his own violent end; Fernando VII died two years later, and the woman who succeeded him needed the liberals so badly that the dead of the beach became state martyrs almost overnight, with an obelisk over their bones in a Málaga square. The painting took its time, and that is the story's second act. In 1886 a liberal government commissioned Gisbert to paint the executions explicitly as civic instruction, the contract specifying a canvas to remind Spaniards what absolutism costs; it went to the Prado in 1888. Gisbert worked from portraits for the faces, kept the palette to sand, sea and black coats, and put the viewer standing in the row: the next batch, waiting, hands joined, one top hat already on the ground where its owner no longer needs it. Spanish schoolbooks have used the image ever since, which is what the contract asked, honestly delivered.