La Pendaison (The Hanging), plate 11 from Les Miseres et les Mal-Heures de la Guerre

This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's impression of La Pendaison, The Hanging, plate 11 of Jacques Callot's eighteen plate Les Miseres et les Mal-Heures de la Guerre of 1633, etched in the year French royal troops occupied Callot's native Nancy and published in Paris by his childhood friend Israel Henriet under a privilege from the same crown. It came to the Museum in the Bequest of Edwin De T. Bechtel, 1957, a New York lawyer who wrote his own book on Callot; a second Bechtel-bequest impression of the identical plate, and a third, wholly unrelated Met impression bought in 1922, are both named here and kept firmly apart from this one.

The plate shows soldiers hanged from a tree by their own army for the pillage the series' earlier plates had just shown them committing. Scholars remain divided on whether that makes the series an early anti-war statement or an image that quietly endorses the very military authority that had occupied the artist's home duchy; this record gives both readings rather than choosing between them. The Museum's own catalogue leaves this sheet's exact state undecided between first and second, most likely because trimming has cut close to the verse text that would settle the question, an honest gap this record records rather than resolves.

What is documented without dispute is the object's identity: accession 57.650.404, item 10, Lieure 1349, Meaume 574, credited to Bechtel's 1957 bequest, and distinct from every other impression of the same plate named in this file.

What the plate shows

A gallows tree fills the center of a small horizontal sheet, its branches hung with the bodies of men who have already been hanged and, at its foot, more men waiting their turn under guard. A priest attends one of the condemned. Soldiers stand watch in ranks to either side, and further groups recede into a shallow, silvery landscape typical of Callot's late manner, built from thousands of tiny etched marks rather than broad tonal masses. Nothing in the scene identifies a specific place or campaign. That is deliberate: this is plate 11 of an eighteen plate sequence that narrates the anonymous, repeatable mechanics of a seventeenth century army's own justice, not a single reported event.

The six line verse etched into the lower margin, attributed to the French translator and man of letters Michel de Marolles, states the plate's argument outright: the men hanging from the tree like fruit are thieves, and their deaths are the working of a shame and vengeance that is also, in the verse's own terms, the justice of Heaven. The image does not show an atrocity committed against soldiers. It shows soldiers being executed by their own side, under a code that reached this severity for the crime the previous plates in the sequence had just finished depicting: pillage.

This impression

The impression catalogued here is accession 57.650.404, item 10, part of the print collection Edwin De T. Bechtel left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his death in 1957. It is a small, trimmed sheet, 7.4 by 18.7 centimeters, with the platemark itself not separately measured in the Museum's published record. The Museum's own catalogue entry records the state only as first or second of three, a rare piece of institutional hedging worth taking at face value rather than resolving for it: trimming a sheet this closely can remove or crop the very verse text that distinguishes a first state print, without verses, from a second state print, with them. Where the surviving margin runs, six lines of verse are present, which points toward the second state, but this record follows the Museum in not overstating certainty beyond what its own published data commits to.

The credit line is unambiguous: Bequest of Edwin De T. Bechtel, 1957. Nothing in the object's own Museum record states a price, a dealer or a prior owner. That silence is itself recorded below rather than filled in.

Two Bechtel impressions of the same plate

The Bechtel bequest did not give the Met a single impression of La Pendaison. A second impression of the identical plate, also second state, also carrying the credit line Bequest of Edwin De T. Bechtel, 1957, is catalogued separately as accession 57.650.417, item 11 (Met object 416025). Its sheet is slightly larger, 8.1 by 18.6 centimeters, and no public image of it has been published by the Museum.

The two accessions carry different parent numbers, 57.650.404 and 57.650.417, which is how the Met distinguishes separate albums or mounted groups within one large bequest rather than separate donations. The simplest reading is that Bechtel owned at least two bound or mounted sets of the eighteen plate series, and that the two sets were catalogued into the Museum's system as two distinct groups, with La Pendaison landing at item 10 in one and item 11 in the other. That one-item offset is most easily explained if one set's items were numbered from the frontispiece and the other's were not, but the Museum's public data does not say so and this record does not assert it as fact. It is a case study in exactly the discipline this publication exists to apply: a collector owning more than one impression of the same print is not a version problem so long as every accession number is kept distinct, which is why both are named here rather than silently merged into one.

A third Met impression exists and is unrelated to Bechtel entirely: accession 22.68.14, acquired via the Rogers Fund in 1922, thirty five years before the Bechtel bequest. Its sheet is uncut, 10.5 by 21 centimeters against a platemark of 8.2 by 18.6, and the Museum publishes an image of it. It is named here only to keep it from ever being confused with either Bechtel impression; none of its provenance belongs to this record's subject.

The eighteen plate sequence

Les Miseres et les Mal-Heures de la Guerre runs, in the order etched and numbered on the plates themselves, from a frontispiece through the raising of an army, a battle, and then a run of plates on what victorious soldiers do to civilians once discipline breaks down: raiding a farm, pillaging a monastery, robbing travelers on the highway, burning a village. The back half of the sequence, plates 9 through 14, turns the same violence back on the soldiers themselves: their arrest, the strappado, the hanging shown here, the firing squad, and burning and breaking on the wheel. The final plates show a military hospital, dying men by the roadside, peasants taking their own revenge, and a closing scene of commanders being rewarded, a plate many readers of the series have found the most bitter of the eighteen precisely because nothing in it is punished.

Plate 11 is the fulcrum of that second half and, by wide agreement among dealers, museums and the print's own reputation, the single most reproduced and most frequently illustrated image from the entire series. Its place in the sequence matters to reading it correctly: it follows directly from the strappado of plate 10 and precedes the firing squad of plate 12, forming a triptych of military punishments rather than standing alone.

Lorraine, 1633, and the occupation behind the series

Callot was a native of Nancy, the capital of the independent duchy of Lorraine, at a moment when Lorraine's independence was ending. In 1633, the year this series was etched and published, French royal troops under Louis XIII occupied Nancy itself, a step in Cardinal Richelieu's absorption of the duchy that the Thirty Years War made possible. Callot did not merely witness this at a distance. According to an early biographical tradition, when the French court asked him to engrave a commemorative plate of the reduction of his own city, he refused, reportedly saying he would rather cut off his right hand than use it on such a work. That anecdote is carried by early encyclopedic sources rather than by a document in Callot's own hand, and is flagged here as such, but the occupation itself, and its date, are not in dispute.

The Miseries series was published in Paris the same year, with a royal privilege from the same king whose army had just taken Callot's home city. That is the tension a reader has to hold: the object was licensed by the power that occupied Lorraine, made by a Lorrainer, and shows the abuses of exactly the kind of army that had done the occupying, without a single plate naming a nationality, a campaign or a side.

Publication: Israel Henriet and the Paris edition

The series was etched by Callot and published in Paris by Israel Henriet (c. 1590-1661), who was not a casual business contact but a childhood friend from Nancy and the son of Claude Henriet, the court painter under whom Callot had received his earliest training in Lorraine. Henriet had established himself in Paris as a printmaker, print seller and publisher, and became, in effect, Callot's sole outlet there; the two men's Nancy origins and Henriet's father's role as Callot's first teacher are the reasons this was a publisher a war-displaced Lorraine artist could trust with his most politically pointed work.

Henriet's name appears etched directly into the plate of La Pendaison, Israel excud. cum privil. Reg., meaning published by Israel under royal privilege, in the earlier states. After Callot's death in 1635, Henriet continued to issue impressions from plates he had inherited or acquired, which is the origin of the print's long afterlife independent of its maker; his own death in 1661 passed that stock of plates on again. More than three hundred of Callot's original copper plates, from across his output, survive today at the Musee Historique Lorrain in Nancy, physical objects that can still, in principle, be reprinted.

States, and how a period impression is told from a later one

Lieure catalogues La Pendaison as number 1349, in three states. The first state, exceptionally rare, carries neither the six line verse nor a plate number. The second state adds Michel de Marolles's verse in the lower margin along with Henriet's Israel excud. imprint, which is the state this impression is closest to. The third state replaces that imprint with Callot inv. et fec., etched in after ownership of the plate passed on from Henriet's original arrangement. Early, well printed sets of the eighteen plates are generally found with the frontispiece in its third state and most interior plates, including this one, in their second, with the final plate alone reaching a fourth state; a plate this far along in its own state history was already being reprinted repeatedly within Callot's lifetime and shortly after it.

Separating a genuine seventeenth century impression from a later restrike of the same unaltered plate rests on the same evidence print connoisseurship always uses: the sharpness of the fine hatching that builds Callot's silvery distances, which coarsens visibly as a copper plate wears under repeated printing and rebiting; the paper itself, since a seventeenth century laid sheet differs in structure from later paper even before any watermark is legible; and the presence or absence of later published sets that reprinted the original Henriet plates well after Callot's death. This record has not undertaken paper or plate wear analysis of the Bechtel sheet itself; it states the general method rather than a conclusion about this specific impression, which the Museum's own uncertainty over its exact state already signals as a live question rather than a settled one.

The scholarly debate: indictment or accommodation

Two readings of this series have coexisted in the literature for decades and neither has retired the other. One, associated with the series' long popular reputation, treats it as the first sustained anti-war statement in European printmaking: eighteen plates that refuse heroism, refuse a named enemy, and dwell instead on what war does to the people caught inside it, civilian and soldier alike. The art historian Diane Wolfthal argued a more qualified version of this position in a 1977 Art Bulletin article on the series, and later, with a co-author, in a fuller study of Callot's military prints; H. Diane Russell's chapter on Callot's military work in the National Gallery of Art's 1975 Callot exhibition catalogue is the other point scholars return to on this question.

The competing reading notes that the second half of the series, plates 9 through 14 and this plate in particular, does not simply document cruelty; it shows the French military's own disciplinary code being enforced, thieves and looters punished by the same authority that licensed the series' publication. Read this way, the sequence can be seen as endorsing, or at minimum accommodating, the just, crime-punishing authority of the royal army that had just occupied the artist's own homeland, rather than condemning war as such. Recent commentary on the series describes its overall tone as ambivalent or impartial rather than as a clear moral verdict, a description this record adopts as the fairer summary of where the debate currently sits: the series depicts violence without an easy moral judgment attached to it, and plate 11 is the image in which that ambivalence is hardest to resolve, since it asks the viewer to read a hanging as both an atrocity and as justice being done, in the same six lines of verse.

No consensus resolves this, and this record does not arbitrate it. What can be said without dispute is that Callot, a Lorrainer who had just refused to commemorate his own city's fall, chose to close the middle of this series with an image of an army executing its own men, published under the license of the very crown that had taken Nancy.

Reception and afterlife

The gallows tree of plate 11 became one of the most borrowed images in the whole series. William Hogarth reused its silhouette, decades later and in a wholly different register, in his satirical print on the collapse of the South Sea Company, replacing Callot's condemned men with the ruined speculators of his own day; that print survives in public collections and documents the borrowing independently of any claim made here about Callot's original intent. The wider series, and this plate specifically, is regularly cited as a forerunner of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War nearly two centuries later, a lineage scholarship on both artists treats as well established even though Callot's restraint, small format and lack of a single named victim differ sharply from Goya's closer, more visceral focus.

The series' modern popularity rests on this plate more than on any other single image in it. It is the plate most frequently reproduced in survey texts on the history of war imagery, and the one most often illustrated when the series is mentioned in passing rather than studied plate by plate, which is itself worth noting: the series' reputation for pacifism is carried disproportionately by its single most punitive image.

Edwin De T. Bechtel and the 1957 bequest

Edwin DeTurck Bechtel (1880-1957) was a New York lawyer, not a professional art historian by training. Born in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania, a town his own family had founded, he took a law degree at Harvard and practiced from 1911 to 1948 with the New York firm Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Alongside that career he collected the prints of Jacques Callot and of Honore Daumier and wrote on both. His study Jacques Callot appeared from George Braziller in New York in 1955, two years before his death, in a printing limited to 750 copies, with 46 pages of text followed by 233 plates of illustration, an unusually large plate section for a text of that length and a sign of how much of the book's argument Bechtel was content to let the prints themselves carry.

Bechtel's public life ran well outside art history. He was president and board chairman of the New York Botanical Garden and chairman of the Horticultural Society of New York and of the International Flower Show, and won the Garden Club of America's Jane Righter Rose Medal in 1953; the Bechtel Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden was dedicated to his memory in 1972. He died at his home in Bedford, New York, on 4 July 1957. His will left his Callot and Daumier prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the bequest recorded in the Museum's accession registers that same year and carried today on every sheet from his collection as the credit line Bequest of Edwin De T. Bechtel, 1957, including both Met impressions of this plate.

Market context, kept separate from this impression's own history

This impression did not pass through a sale; it came to the Museum by bequest, and no purchase price for it by Bechtel has been found in the sources consulted for this record. That silence is recorded as a gap, not filled with an estimate.

Separately, complete eighteen plate sets of the series, not this impression and not from this collection, do appear at auction with some regularity, generally in later, well used states and at prices in the low thousands of pounds or euros for a full run, reflecting both the size of the edition Henriet and his successors printed over more than two centuries and the fact that a complete set commands more than the sum of scattered single sheets. A single impression of this specific plate was entered for sale at Christie's, New York, on 2 November 1983 as lot 18 and did not sell. No further individual sale of this exact plate, isolated from a complete set, was located during this research. This market information describes the plate in general, not the Bechtel or Rogers Fund impressions specifically, and should never be read as a valuation of either.